Peter Watts Quotes.

11. "You think there's something bigger than you out there, you f*****g well keep your head down and hope it doesn't notice."
- Peter Watts, Crysis: Legion

12. "Fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and the tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations - and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there were`t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learn to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favours the paranoid. Even here in the 21st century we can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us."
- Peter Watts, Echopraxia

13. "Dogs are always going to come up short if you insist on defining them as a weird kind of cat."
- Peter Watts, Echopraxia

14. "Truth had never been a priority. If believing a lie kept the genes proliferating, the system would believe that lie with all its heart."
- Peter Watts, Echopraxia

15. "A neuron didn’t know whether it fired in response to a scent or a symphony. Brain cells weren’t intelligent; only brains were. And brain cells weren’t even the lower limit. The origins of thought were buried so deep they predated multicellular life itself: neurotransmitters in choanoflagellates, potassium ion gates in Monosiga. I am a colony of microbes talking to itself, Brüks reflected."
- Peter Watts, Echopraxia

16. "I know, I know: it can be frustrating as hell. But people have an unfortunate habit of assuming they understand the reality just because they understood the analogy. You dumb down brain surgery enough for a preschooler to think he understands it, the little tyke’s liable to grab a microwave scalpel and start cutting when no one’s looking."
- Peter Watts, Echopraxia

17. "Most people seem to think that organisms develop adaptive traits in response to environmental change. This is bullshit. The environment changes and those who already happen to have newly adaptive traits don’t get wiped out."
- Peter Watts, Echopraxia

18. "At least with the Catholics, you know that when someone hands you a cracker there’s gonna be wine in the mix at some point."
- Peter Watts, Echopraxia

19. "We climbed this hill. Each step up we could see farther, so of course we kept going. Now we’re at the top. Science has been at the top for a few centuries now. And we look out across the plain and we see this other tribe dancing around above the clouds, even higher than we are. Maybe it’s a mirage, maybe it’s a trick. Or maybe they just climbed a higher peak we can’t see because the clouds are blocking the view. So we head off to find out—but every step takes us downhill. No matter what direction we head, we can’t move off our peak without losing our vantage point. So we climb back up again. We’re trapped on a local maximum. But what if there is a higher peak out there, way across the plain? The only way to get there is to bite the bullet, come down off our foothill and trudge along the riverbed until we finally start going uphill again. And it’s only then you realize: Hey, this mountain reaches way higher than that foothill we were on before, and we can see so much better from up here. But you can’t get there unless you leave behind all the tools that made you so successful in the first place. You have to take that first step downhill."
- Peter Watts, Echopraxia

20. "A neuron didn’t know whether it fired in response to a scent or a symphony. Brain cells weren’t intelligent; only brains were."
- Peter Watts, Echopraxia