Rainbows are not just beautiful to look at. In a way, they tell us when everything began, including time and space. I think that makes the rainbow even more beautiful.
The earliest form of natural selection was simply a selection of stable forms and a rejection of unstable ones.
We don’t have to invent wildly implausible stories: we have the joy and excitement of real scientific investigation and discovery to keep our imaginations in line. And in the end that is more exciting than fantasy.
An animal moves as a coordinated whole, as a unit. Subjectively I feel like a unit, not a colony. This is to be expected. Selection has favoured genes that cooperate with others. In the fierce competition for scarce resources, in the relentless struggle to eat other survival machines, and to avoid being eaten, there must have been a premium on central coordination rather than anarchy within the communal body.
Just as feminists wince when they hear ‘he’ rather than ‘he or she’, or ‘man’ rather than ‘human’, I want everybody to flinch whenever we hear a phrase such as ‘Catholic child’ or ‘Muslim child’.
Unless otherwise stated, ‘altruistic behaviour’ and ‘selfish behaviour’ will mean behaviour directed by one animal body toward another.
To adapt Alice’s comment on her sister’s book before she fell into Wonderland, what is the use of a God who does no miracles and answers no prayers? Remember Ambrose Bierce’s witty definition of the verb ‘to pray’: ‘to ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy’.
Genes manipulate the world and shape it to assist their replication.
The trouble with overt trial is that it takes time and energy. The trouble with overt error is that it is often fatal. Simulation is both safer and faster.
But the whole point of Hamilton’s argument is that the distinction between family and non-family is not hard and fast, but a matter of mathematical probability.
On reflection, my imagined Hindu litigator would have been as likely to play the ‘If you can’t beat them join them’ card. His polytheism isn’t really polytheism but monotheism in disguise.
Half a wing could save your life by easing your fall from a tree of a certain height. And 51 per cent of a wing could save you if you fall from a slightly taller tree.
Once the vital ingredient – some kind of genetic molecule – is in place, true Darwinian natural selection can follow, and complex life emerges as the eventual consequence.
If the odds of life originating spontaneously on a planet were a billion to one against, nevertheless that stupefyingly improbable event would still happen on a billion planets.
Time is the currency of this two-bidder auction.
A mutant individual who was prepared to go on just a little bit longer would always win. So the strategy of maintaining a fixed bidding limit is unstable.
Compared with the Old Testament’s psychotic delinquent, the deist God of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment is an altogether grander being:.
First cousins, for instance, have two common ancestors, and the generation distance via each one is 4. Therefore their relatedness is.
Each individual goes on for an unpredictable time. Unpredictable on any particular occasion, that is, but averaging the true value of the resource.
And I shall not be concerned at all with other religions such as Buddhism or Confucianism. Indeed, there is something to be said for treating these not as religions at all but as ethical systems or philosophies of life.