The brain and its satellite glands have now been probed to the point where no particular site remains that can reasonably be supposed to harbor a nonphysical mind.
To genetic evolution, the human lineage has added the parallel track of cultural evolution.
In science, you really do need to have a purpose-driven life. You will succeed to the extent that you get the most out of your career so that you can give the most back. Try to be an addict, driven to achieve discoveries, learning new things, and then writing about them.
Religious belief itself is an adaptation that has evolved because we’re hard-wired to form tribalistic religions.
I see no way out of the problems that organized religion and tribalism create other than humans just becoming more honest and fully aware of themselves.
People need a sacred narrative. They must have a sense of larger purpose, in one form or another, however intellectualized. They will find a way to keep ancestral spirits alive.
The historical circumstance of interest is that the tropical rain forests have persisted over broad parts of the continents since their origins as stronghold of the flowering plants 150 million years ago.
Ninety-nine percent of all species that ever lived are now extinct.
To be anthropocentric is to remain unaware of the limits of human nature, the significance of biological processes underlying human behavior, and the deeper meaning of long-term genetic evolution.
Let us see how high we can fly before the sun melts the wax in our wings. About the ambitious pursuit of knowledge, alluding to Icarus of the Greek myth.
The ant world is a tumult, a noisy world of pheromones being passed back and forth.
So in my freshman year at the University of Alabama, learning the literature on evolution, what was known about it biologically, just gradually transformed me by taking me out of literalism and increasingly into a more secular, scientific view of the world.
Religious beliefs evolved by group-selection, tribe competing against tribe, and the illogic of religions is not a weakness but their essential strength.
The human juggernaut is permanently eroding Earth’s ancient biosphere.
The variety of genes on the planet in viruses exceeds, or is likely to exceed, that in all of the rest of life combined.
The work on ants has profoundly affected the way I think about humans.
The world depends on fungi, because they are major players in the cycling of materials and energy around the world.
Real biologists who actually do the research will tell you that they almost never find a phenomenon, no matter how odd or irrelevant it looks when they first see it, that doesn’t prove to serve a function. The outcome itself may be due to small accidents of evolution.
In 2010, my two Harvard mathematician colleagues and I dismantled kin-selection theory, which was the reigning theory of the origin of altruism at the time.
In some ways, I had a traditional ‘old South’ upbringing, meaning that I spent some time in a military school, and acquired an inoculum of the military ethic that is still with me today: honor, duty, loyalty.