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“the Darwinian world of nature, however, which they claim is the only one, there can be no such things as rights, either for humans or for animals, but only the struggle for survival in which we have no more significance than ants or wasps.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Do We Need God to Be Good?

“The idea of people “inventing�� religious beliefs to “provide the needed social links�� comes out of the same rationalist stable as the claim that kings invented religious beliefs to justify their oppression of their subjects and that capitalists did the same to justify their exploitation of their workers. Religious belief simply doesn’t work like that. It is true, however, that what he calls universal and missionary religions started appearing in the first millennium BC.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“It is quite remarkable that the whole discussion of cheating by evolutionary psychologists is entirely dominated by the assumptions of the game theorists and economists, completely rooted as they are in the world-view of modern liberal individualistic capitalism, and who think purely in terms of the material benefits of cheating.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“Ignoring these drastic limitations on our knowledge has meant that many so-called ‘adaptive explanations�� are merely pseudo-scientific ‘Just So Stories��, often made up without any anthropological knowledge, that have increasingly brought evolutionary psychology into disrepute.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Do We Need God to be Good?: An Anthropologist Considers the Evidence

“Harari’s belief that the Cognitive Revolution provided the modes of thought and reasoning that are the basis of our scientific civilisation could not therefore be further from the truth. We may accept that people became able to speak in sentences at this time, and language is certainly essential to human culture, but anthropologists and developmental psychologists, in their studies of primitive societies, have found that their language development and their modes of thought about space, time, classification, causality and the self have much more resemblance to those of the Piraha than to those of members of modern industrial societies.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“In the first place, as we saw earlier, the menace of the free-rider that permeates evolutionary psychology is a fantasy. In the simple subsistence economies of hunter-gatherers and early farmers failure to reciprocate in exchange relations, or to participate in communal activities cannot be concealed and got away with. Nor in any case does survival and reproduction have any relation to the exchange of resources.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“But a consistent Darwinist should surely rejoice to see such a fine demonstration of the survival of the fittest, with other species either decimated or subjected to human rule, and the poor regularly ground under foot in the struggle for survival.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“Now it is perfectly true that nothing unifies a group more effectively than a threat, particularly an enemy. This may be external, but an internal enemy, a traitor, a trouble-maker, a deviant, will do as well, and the group feels better if it has someone to bully and despise. But while every group and society contains despised groups and individuals, they are not normally killed or even necessarily ill-treated, let alone selected for slaughter. Not surprisingly, it is very hard to find eyewitness accounts of human sacrifice, but the following example is nevertheless very instructive.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“Harari clearly has no knowledge at all of cross-cultural developmental psychology, and of how modes of thought develop in relation to the natural and socio-cultural environments. The people who carved the Stadel lion-man around 30,000 years ago and the Piraha had the same ability to learn as we do, which is why Piraha children can learn to count, but these cognitive skills have to be learnt: we are not born with them all ready to go. Cross-cultural developmental psychology has shown that the development of the cognitive skills of modern humans actually requires literacy and schooling, large-scale bureaucratic societies and complex urban life, the experience of cultural differences, and familiarity with modern technology, to name some of the more important requirements”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“Religion�� is not, in fact, some simple disposition that could possibly be either innate or learned. It is a highly complex phenomenon both psychologically and culturally, and there are major differences between the forms of religion found in primitive societies and the world religions with which we are familiar, as I have described in detail elsewhere (Hallpike 1977: 254-74; 2008a: 266-87; 2008b: 288-388; 2016: 62-88). But studying all these ethnographic facts is time-consuming and boring, and it is much more fun to assume that we all know what we mean by “religion”—something like “faith in spiritual beings”—and get on with constructing imaginative explanations about how it must have been adaptive for early man.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“It didn’t work out that way, however, because people didn’t foresee population growth, poor diet and disease. Since it would have taken many generations to realise all the disadvantages of agriculture, by that time the population would have grown so large that it would have been impossible to go back to foraging, so the agricultural trap closed on Man for evermore.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“It has also been pointed out that as well as the “acquisitive mimesis�� that principally concerns Girard, there is also what can be called “beneficial mimesis��, as when individuals provide models of good behaviour, such as settling disputes, kindness, and generosity. But if there is such a thing as beneficial mimesis this means that social peace can be re-established by other means than scapegoating and sacrifice, as we know from the many ceremonial forms of peace-making in primitive society.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“We can now move on to his general theory of imitation or mimesis. There is no doubt that human culture could not exist without imitation, notably by children imitating their parents and other adults. We all have a natural tendency to imitate our peers as well, and important people or classes also have a very powerful influence on fashions of all kinds.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“By the state I mean centralised political authority, usually a king, supported by tribute and taxes, and with a monopoly of armed force. Although it has been estimated that only about 20% of tribal societies in Africa, the Americas, Polynesia, New Guinea, and many parts of Asia actually developed the state, the state was almost as important a revolution in human history as agriculture itself, because of all the further developments it made possible, and a large literature on the process of state formation has developed”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“By the time of Galileo, whom Harari does not even mention, the idea that science should be useful had become a dominant idea of Western science. Galileo was very much in the natural magic tradition and was a prime example of a man of learning who was equally at home in the workshop as in the library—as is well-known, when he heard of the Dutch invention of the telescope he constructed one himself and ground his own lenses to do so. But Galileo was also enormously important in showing the crucial part that experiment had in the advancement of science.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“The Epicureans, however, do not belong in this group at all as they were ancient materialist atheists who did not believe in natural law of any kind.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“These criticisms of agriculture are, of course, quite familiar, and up to a point legitimate. But if agriculture was really such a bad deal why would humans ever have gone along with it? Harari begins by suggesting that wheat and other crops actually domesticated us, and made us work for them, rather than the other way round, but this doesn’t get him very far in explaining the persistence of agriculture, and instead he argues that wheat offered nothing to individuals, but only to the species by enabling the growth of larger populations.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“So far, we have been considering accounts of cannibalism that involve the eating of enemy prisoners, usually killed or captured in warfare. Cross-culturally this appears to be the basic form of cannibalism; there seems little evidence that shortage of protein had anything to do with it, as materialists like Marvin Harris supposed; and many primitive societies were as strongly opposed to cannibalism as we are. There is, however, a different type of cannibalism, conventionally known as “endo-cannibalism��, in which the relatives of a deceased person eat the corpse, or part of it, as a mortuary”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“Arens’s hilarity at the racist idea of Creutzfeld-Jacob disease being transmitted by cannibalism turned out to be misplaced, however, since it was cattle cannibalism in the form of brain and spinal cord matter from diseased animals being included in cattle feed that led, a few years later, to the spread of BSE in Britain. Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, or Mad Cow Disease, was a prion disease that also infected a number of humans in the form of vCJD, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, and led to a ban on the export of British beef in 1996.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“Social success in primitive society, therefore, is achieved by those who are perceived to help the group, not by those who cheat and sponge from it, and cheating as a successful strategy can only work when a number of basic social changes have taken place. These are: much larger societies with a high percentage of people who are strangers; the growth of trade and commerce, particularly through the medium of money; the accumulation of material wealth; and the growth of complex bureaucratic systems of redistribution. So it should be obvious that it is not the hunter-gatherer band but modern industrial society that provides by far the most advantageous environment for freeloaders to flourish, such as bogus welfare claimants, tax evaders, and confidence-tricksters of every kind, but evolution has sadly neglected to provide us with any “cheater-detection�� module to cope with this.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“In conclusion, I would like to return briefly to this notion that the key threat to co-operation in human groups is the freeloading outsider. As I have pointed out again and again, in so far as freeloading is possible at all in such societies it only leads to contempt and low status for those concerned.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“On Tonga in the early nineteenth century it is described (Martin 1827(I): 189-91) how in the course of warfare a warrior killed a man within a sacred enclosure, which was a very serious act of sacrilege. The priest of the temple was consulted, and revealed that a child must be sacrificed to appease the anger of the god, and the victim had to be a child of a chief by one of his concubines. The chiefs met to decide which of their number must provide the sacrifice, and one of the chiefs present agreed to allow his child, a little boy of two, to be the victim. He was then ritually strangled, and his body carried round all the neighbouring temples to appease their gods as well, before it was released to be buried. This sacrifice had nothing to do with restraining the warfare itself, which continued unabated, and the general emotion among the people involved was acute fear of the anger of the gods, not the rage of communal violence. The only other sentiment recorded was sadness for the little child—“Why are the gods so cruel?��. Nothing here provides any support for Girard’s theory of the human scapegoating”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“The cynical ruler, smirking behind his hand at the simplicity of the peasants who thought him divine, is actually an invention of the Enlightenment.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“One might first of all ask just why a universal, unchanging language would be particularly useful since, as was historically the case, we only need to speak to the narrow range of people we are likely to meet in real life.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“On the contrary, it was the general human disposition to attribute sacred status to those in authority that was one of the main reasons why it could develop.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“Japan, for example, which apparently “suffers�� from an almost complete lack of swearing, deserves a whole chapter to itself. But Westerners are always making the ethnocentric assumption that what is normal for them must also be normal for everyone else, a constant and universal feature of human nature itself, whereas in fact it may just be a product of social and cultural factors, and I shall try to show that this is the case with swearing.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“Wilson’s basic fallacy is very simple: he assumes, quite wrongly, that homosexuals can’t (or won’t) marry and have children, whereas there is plenty of evidence from anthropology, the classical world, and more recent history, that homosexuals of both genders are quite capable, in most cases, of marrying and begetting children.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“Wilson’s hypothesis of the helpful, nepotistic homosexual uncle increasing his inclusive fitness by looking after his nieces and nephews does not, then, find any ethnographic support, and his ideas are in fact completely uninformed speculation.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“It is a curious feature of the intellectual world that many people think themselves perfectly qualified to dogmatise about primitive society while knowing very little about it. Evolutionary psychologists are one example, and Girard is another.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“Premodern traditions of knowledge such as Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and Confucianism asserted that everything that is important to know about the world was already known. The great gods, or the one almighty God, or the wise people of the past possessed all-encompassing wisdom, which they revealed to us in scriptures and oral traditions. (279-80) These traditions may have claimed to know all that was essential to salvation and peace of mind, but that kind of knowledge had nothing whatsoever to do with pre-modern traditions of science. In Europe this meant Aristotle and Greek natural philosophy but about which, astonishingly, Harari has nothing at all to say anywhere in his book.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society