Home > Author > Heather E. Heying
61 " engaging in more ancient activities, be it walking or sports, gardening or hunting, will often integrate all aspects of physical activity without any planning or counting being required. "
― Heather E. Heying , A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life
62 " we are all distinct—what will work for one person may not work for another; this variation between individuals is perhaps the most fundamental of evolutionary observations. "
63 " When we sit down to eat a meal together, especially when we are breaking bread that we have ourselves made, we gain far more than calories. "
64 " it is the human discovery of that molecule that has elevated it to the status of being studied. It was there all along, but now we have imbued it with mystical qualities. Our discovery of it changes nothing about what it does. We often mistake an effect (e.g., of an action, a treatment, a molecule) for our understanding of the effect. What a thing does, and what we think (or know) that it does, are not the same thing. "
65 " the human niche is niche switching. More specifically, we argue that the human niche is to move between the paired, inverse modes of culture and consciousness. "
66 " We are being solidified by modernity into states that, in prior eras, would have been more ephemeral. "
67 " Through parallel processing of multiple human minds, our consciousness can become collective, and we can solve problems that neither we could solve as individuals nor our ancestors could have even imagined. "
68 " In times of stability, when inherited wisdom allows individuals to prosper and spread across relatively homogeneous landscapes: Culture reigns. But in times of expansion into new frontiers, when innovation and interpretation, and communication of new ideas, are critical: Consciousness reigns. "
69 " novel levels of novelty, such as we are experiencing now, are a special danger. This means that what’s needed today—and urgently—is a call to consciousness on a scale that we have not seen before. "
70 " Male and female are complementary states, and there is a healthy natural tension between them. "
71 " Employing evolutionary logic is not exclusively about discovering our strengths; it is also about understanding our weaknesses and when to augment with modern solutions. "
72 " In each case, the belief is literally false, but metaphorically true. "
73 " This means that the cover story isn’t true, but when people behave as if it were, they prosper. "
74 " the sheer number and breadth of medical conditions that vary in lifetime risk by birth month should be enough to make a thoughtful person rethink a wholesale rejection of careful astrological thinking. "
75 " One truth that emerges from understanding consciousness in this way is that it makes little sense to assume that individual consciousness evolved first, or that it is the most fundamental form of consciousness. "
76 " Our throughput society depends on insecurity, gluttony, and planned obsolescence. It’s how we keep the lights on. "
77 " Dogs are in many ways a human construct. We have co-evolved with them for so long that they are now attuned to human behavior, language, and emotion. "
78 " What’s the biggest and most important problem I can solve with my gifts and skills? Or: How do I find my consciousness, my truest self? "
79 " The wisdom of elders is ancient and necessary in human history, and there is deep value in being skeptical of the wisdom of elders, when that wisdom is out of place, or of the wrong time. "
80 " In alligators, the temperature of an egg as it develops determines the sex of its inhabitant: low temperatures create females, high temps make males. The same is true for tortoises, but "