Education Quote by Robert Shea

Evolution gets sold as a lone-wolf fantasy: the smartest primate triumphs, the toughest gene wins, the strong deserve their spot at the top. Shea kneecaps that story with a single, almost throwaway image: leopards. Not an abstract “environmental pressure,” but a mouth with teeth. The joke has bite because it’s true: for most of human prehistory, the world wasn’t a meritocracy, it was a menu.

Shea’s specific intent is to reframe survival as a collective project. “Care for one another and hunt in packs” pairs tenderness with tactics, implying that empathy isn’t a luxury tacked onto civilization; it’s part of the original toolkit. The line also smuggles in a political argument without preaching it: if cooperation is what got us here, then social solidarity isn’t sentimental, it’s pragmatic. In that sense, the leopard functions as a rhetorical villain that makes individualism look quaint - even suicidal.

The subtext lands especially well in the late-20th-century context Shea wrote in, when pop-Darwinist thinking and rugged self-reliance rhetoric were having a cultural moment. By invoking “millions of years ago,” he widens the timeline until contemporary posturing feels microscopic. Your ideology doesn’t matter much when you’re being stalked.

It’s also quietly anti-romantic about “ancestors”: no noble savages, no heroic founders. Just scared, social animals figuring out that mutual care and coordinated violence - community and strategy - beat going it alone.