Words from Others on this Topic

I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions, but … laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

Thomas Jefferson, 1816, from the letter “To Samuel Kercheval, 1816”

As we are increasingly coming to realize, our species does represent a new evolutionary process — cultural evolution — that far surpasses cultural traditions in other species. This capacity for cultural evolution enabled our ancestors to spread over the globe, inhabiting all climatic zones and dozens of ecological niches. Then small-scale societies — “tiny grains of thought”" — coalesced into larger and larger societies over the past ten thousand years.

David Sloan Wilson, 2019, from the book This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution

Evolution in man during recorded time has been social rather than biological: it has proceeded not by heritable variations in the species, but mostly by economic, political, intellectual, and moral innovation transmitted to individuals and generations by imitation, custom, or education. Custom and tradition within a group correspond to type and heredity in the species, and to instincts in the individual; they are ready adjustments to typical and frequently repeated situations. New situations, however, do arise, requiring novel, unstereotyped responses; hence development, in the higher organisms, requires a capacity for experiment and innovation — the social correlates of variation and mutation. Social evolution is an interplay of custom with origination.

Will Durant, 1968, from the book The Lessons of History

The error which most people make when they think about human values is that they assume the nature of man is fixed and there is a single set of human values by which he should live. Such an assumption does not fit with my research. My data indicate that man’s nature is an open, constantly evolving system, a system which proceeds by quantum jumps from one steady state system to the next through a hierarchy of ordered systems.

Clare W. Graves, 1974, from the article “The Futurist: Human Nature Prepares for a Momentous Leap”