This work, they thought, would providethem with more fruit, grain and meat. It was a revolution in the wayhumans lived – the Agricultural Revolution. - P77
Eventually, people were so smart that they wereable to decipher nature‘s secrets, enabling them to tame sheep andcultivate wheat. As soon as this happened, they cheerfully abandonedthe gruelling, dangerous, and often spartan life of hunter-gatherers,
settling down to enjoy the pleasant, satiated life of farmers. - P79
The currency of evolution is neither hunger nor pain, but rathercopies of DNA helixes. Just as the economic success of a companyis measured only by the number of dollars in its bank account, notby the happiness of its employees, so the evolutionary success of aspecies is measured by the number of copies of its DNA. - P83
Once people get used toa certain luxury, they take it for granted. Then they begin to counton it. Finally they reach a point where they can‘t live without it.
Let‘s take another familiar example from our own time. Over thelast few decades, we have invented countless time-saving devicesthat are supposed to make life more relaxed – washing machines,
vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, telephones, mobile phones, com-puters, email. - P87
Unfortunately, the evolutionary perspective is an incompletemeasure of success. It judges everything by the criteria of survivaland reproduction, with no regard for individual suffering and happi-ness. Domesticated chickens and cattle may well be an evolutionarysuccess story, but they are also among the most miserable creaturesthat ever lived. The domestication of animals was founded on a seriesof brutal practices that only became crueller with the passing of thecenturies. - P93
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