Summary of Robert Wright's The Moral Animal

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

Book Preview: #1 The Victorian era was a time of sexual repression, as Victorian physicians warned against the dangers of sexual indulgence for boys. However, this outlook also spread beyond the walls of the Methodist churches into the homes of Anglicans, Unitarians, and even agnostics.

#2 Charles Darwin was originally going to be a doctor, but he became interested in zoology instead. His father, however, wanted him to join the clergy.

#3 The idea of natural selection, while indeed sweeping in significance, is not really massive in structure. It is a small and simple theory. It doesn’t take a huge intellect to conceive it.

#4 The process of natural selection is what makes us what we are today. It is the process of choosing the fittest members of a species, and destroying the less-fit ones.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Feb 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669350736

IRB Media

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Insights on Robert Wright's The Moral Animal

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The Victorian era was a time of sexual repression, as Victorian physicians warned against the dangers of sexual indulgence for boys. However, this outlook also spread beyond the walls of the Methodist churches into the homes of Anglicans, Unitarians, and even agnostics.

#2

Charles Darwin was originally going to be a doctor, but he became interested in zoology instead. His father, however, wanted him to join the clergy.

#3

The idea of natural selection, while indeed sweeping in significance, is not really massive in structure. It is a small and simple theory. It doesn’t take a huge intellect to conceive it.

#4

The process of natural selection is what makes us what we are today. It is the process of choosing the fittest members of a species, and destroying the less-fit ones.

#5

The human mind is a product of natural selection. Every organ inside you is a testament to its art – your heart, your lungs, and your stomach. These are all fine products of inadvertent design, mechanisms that are here because they have in the past contributed to your ancestors’ fitness.

#6

The environment of human evolution has been human beings, not the harshness of nature. The various members of a Stone Age society were each other’s rivals in the contest to fill the next generation with genes. And they were each other’s tools in that contest.

#7

The theory of natural selection states that the basic ways we feel about each other, the basic kinds of things we think about each other and say to each other, are with us today because they helped our ancestors get their genes into the next generation.

#8

Sex is one of the most obvious evolutionary explanations for human behavior. The states of mind that lead to sex are lust, dreamy infatuation, and sturdy love. People all over the world, including Charles Darwin, have come of age in these states.

#9

The intellectual grounding of Victorian sexual morality was that women and men are inherently different, and that the male appetite is less finicky. However, this does not mean that women do not have sexual desires.

#10

The new Darwinian view of sexuality does more than just endorse the coalescing conventional wisdom that men are a libidinous group. It explains the subtle contours of human consciousness, including the Madonna-whore dichotomy and the sexual double standard.

#11

The solution to the female coyness problem is simple, but it took decades to figure it out. The fact that so many scientists failed to see it proves that sex isn’t as obvious as it seems.

#12

The first step toward understanding the basic imbalance of the sexes is to assume the role of natural selection in the human species. You are supposed to make people behave in such a way that they are likely to have lots of offspring.

#13

The fact that women are selective about the men they choose to have children with makes sense from a genetic point of view. Each child is an extremely precious gene machine, and it makes Darwinian sense for a woman to be selective about the man who will help her build these gene machines.

#14

The theory of natural selection says that people's minds were