No doubt this works well enough for The Tale of Benjamin Bunny or The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but I can readily see that ‘The Selfish Gene’ on its own, without the large footnote of the book itself, might give an inadequate impression of its contents.
But of the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth: But thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites; as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee.
Martin Rees, in Just Six Numbers, lists six fundamental constants, which are believed to hold all around the universe.
That is to say that a positive number is the product of zero and infinity.
If the parasite’s means of genetic exit from the host’s body is the same as the host’s, namely the host’s gametes or spores, there will be relatively little conflict between the ‘interests’ of parasite and host genes.
The gene is the basic unit of selfishness.
The main conclusion of Hauser and Singer’s study was that there is no statistically significant difference between atheists and religious believers in making these judgements.
The more energetically and thoroughly you try to disprove a theory, if it survives the assault, the more closely it approaches what common sense happily calls a fact.
A mischievous biologist might wonder whether some other physicists are in need of Darwinian consciousness-raising.
There is the particular additional benefit of conspicuous generosity as a way of buying unfakeably authentic advertising.
Religion has at one time or another been thought to fill four main roles in human life: explanation, exhortation, consolation and inspiration.
You can be a brilliant moral philosopher with a prize-winning doctoral thesis expounding the evils of war, and still be given a hard time by a draft board evaluating your claim to be a conscientious objector. Yet if you can say that one or both of your parents is a Quaker you sail through like a breeze, no matter how inarticulate and illiterate you may be on the theory of pacifism or, indeed, Quakerism itself.
Einstein also said, It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
We can’t prove there are no fairies but that doesn’t mean we think there’s a 50:50 chance fairies exist.
Premature erection of alleged philosophical problems is sometimes a smokescreen for mischief.
I suspect that both astronomers were, yet again, bending over backwards to be polite: theologians have nothing worthwhile to say about anything else; let’s throw them a sop and let them worry away at a couple of questions that nobody can answer and maybe never will.
The phenotypic effects of a meme may be in the form of words, music, visual images, styles of clothes, facial or hand gestures, skills such as opening milk bottles in tits, or panning wheat in Japanese macaques.
Sterelny challenges us to explain ‘how we can be simultaneously so smart and so dumb’.75.
The anthropologist Helen Fisher, in Why We Love, has beautifully expressed the insanity of romantic love, and how over-the-top it is compared with what might seem strictly necessary.
How can we know whether the course of a life would have been changed by some particular alteration in its early history?