An ESS is stable, not because it is particularly good for the individuals participating in it, but simply because it is immune to treachery from within.
The best scientists can do is fail to disprove things while pointing to how hard they tried.
As for the next nearest star, Proxima Centauri, if you look at it in 2012, what you are seeing is happening in 2008.
A human foetus, with no more human feeling than an amoeba, enjoys a reverence and legal protection far in excess of those granted to an adult chimpanzee. Yet.
Even if religion did no other harm in itself, its wanton and carefully nurtured divisiveness – its deliberate and cultivated pandering to humanity’s natural tendency to favour in-groups and shun out-groups – would be enough to make it a significant force for evil in the world.
If you have Mozart to listen to, why would you need God?
Many of us have no grasp of quantum theory, or Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity, but this does not in itself lead us to oppose these theories! Darwinism, unlike ‘Einsteinism’, seems to be regarded as fair game for critics with any degree of ignorance.
Dan Nilsson even remarks of compound eyes that ‘It is only a small exaggeration to say that evolution seems to be fighting a desperate battle to improve a basically disastrous design.
I have never imputed to Nature a purpose or a goal, or anything that could be understood as anthropomorphic. What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.
I should have been put down at birth.
One gene may be regarded as a unit that survives through a large number of successive individual bodies.
Rather than propose a new theory or unearth a new fact, often the most important contribution a scientist can make is to discover a new way of seeing old theories or facts.
The very idea that grand conclusions could follow from such logomachist trickery offends me aesthetically, so I must take care to refrain from bandying words like ‘fool’.
There is no universally agreed definition of a gene.
The workings of the sensory systems are particularly baffling, because they can achieve far more sophisticated feats of pattern-recognition than the best and most expensive man-made machines; if this were not so, all typists would be redundant, superseded by speech-recognizing machines, or machines for reading handwriting.
The genetic code is universal. I regard this as near-conclusive proof that all organisms are descended from a single common ancestor.
It is the plain truth that we are cousins of chimpanzees, somewhat more distant cousins of monkeys, more distant cousins still of aardvarks and manatees, yet more distant cousins of bananas and turnips.
To many Native American tribes the Grand Canyon is a sacred place: site of numerous origin myths from the Havasupai to the Zuni; hushed repose of the Hopi dead. If I were forced to choose a religion, that’s the kind of religion I could go for. The Grand Canyon confers stature on a religion, outclassing the petty smallness of the Abrahamics, the three squabbling cults which, through historical accident, still afflict the world.
Perhaps Islam is analogous to a carnivorous gene complex, Buddhism to a herbivorous one.
This intrepid warrior for truth, this cultured, courteous citizen of the world, this devastating, coruscating enemy of lies and cant – well, maybe he has no immortal soul – none of us has.