"The main conclusion here arrived at... is that man is descended from some less highly organized form. The grounds upon which this conclusion rests will never be shaken, for the close similarity between man and the lower animals in embryonic development, as well as in innumerable points of structure and constitution, both of high and of the most trifling importance,- the rudiments which he retains, and the abnormal reversions to which he is occasionally liable,- are facts which cannot be disputed." Darwin

"But nature -that is, biological evolution - has not fitted man to any specific environment. On the contrary, ... he has a rather crude survival kit; and yet -this is the paradox of the human condition - one that fits him to all environments. Among the multitude of animals which scamper, fly, burrow and swim around us, man is the only one who is not locked into his environment. His imagination, his reason, his emotional subtlety and toughness, make it possible for him not to accept the environment but to change it." Jacob Bronowski

"The replicators which survived were the ones that built survival machines for themselves to live in... Now they swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots... They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines." Richard Dawkins

"What distinguishes our species is thought. The cerebral cortex is a liberation. We need no longer be trapped in the genetically inherited behavior patterns of lizards and baboons." Carl Sagan

"But as much as we would like to take a unified view of nature, we keep encountering a stubborn duality in the role of intelligent life in the universe, as both subject and student. We see this even at the deepest level of modern physics." Steven Weinberg

"Whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed laws of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful, have been and are being, evolved." Darwin

"The large-scale homogeneity of the universe makes it very difficult to believe that the structure of the universe is determined by anything so peripheral as some complicated molecular structure on a minor planet orbiting a very average star in the outer suburbs of a fairly typical galaxy." Steven Hawking

"If all else fails, we may be thrown back on an anthropic explanation. There may in some sense or other be many different universes, each with its own value for the cosmological constant. If this were true, then the only universe in which we could expect to find ourselves is one in which the total cosmological constant is small enough to allow life to arise and evolve." Steven Weinberg

"The argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes. Like successful Chicago gangsters, our genes have survived, in some cases for millions of years, in a highly competitive world. This entitles us to expect certain qualities of our genes. I shall argue that the predominate quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthless selfishness." Richard Dawkins

"Insofar as it makes for the survival of one's descendents and near relations, altruistic behavior is a kind of Darwinian fitness, and may be expected to spread as a result of natural selection." J. B. S. Haldane

"What is the direct evidence for genetic control of specific human social behavior? At the moment the answer is none whatever... Sociobiologist must therefore advance indirect arguments based on plausibility." Steven Gould

"It is nature's intention also to erect a physical difference between the body of the freeman and that of the slave, giving the latter strength for the menial duties of life, but making the former upright in carriage and useful for the various purposes of civic life... It is thus clear that just as some are by nature free, so others are by nature slaves, and for these latter the condition of slavery is both beneficial and just." Aristotle.

"A devil, born a devil, on whose nature Nurture can never stick; on whom my pains, Humanely taken, are all lost, quite lost." Shakespeare

"Nature hath made men so equal in the faculties of the body and mind; as that though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body, or of quicker mind than another. Yet when all is reckoned together, the difference between man and man, is not so considerable, as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit, to which another may not pretend, as well as he." Thomas Hobbes

"This Rousseauist tradition has a remarkably strong grip on the post-occidental imagination. It is feared that without it we shall be prey to reactionary persuasion by assorted villains, from social-Darwinists to eugenicists, fascists and new-right conservatives. To fend of this villainy, the argument goes, we must assert that man is either innately neutral (tabula rasa) or innately good and that bad circumstances are what make him behave wickedly." Robin Fox

"In time, much knowledge concerning the genetic foundation of social behavior will accumulate, and techniques man become available for altering gene complexes by molecular engineering and rapid selection through cloning. At the very least, slow evolutionary change will be feasible through conventional eugenics." E O Wilson

"The initial configuration of the universe may have been chosen by God, or it may have been determined by the laws of science. In either case, it would seem that everything in the universe would then be determined by evolution according to the laws of science, so it is difficult to see how we can be masters of our fate." Steven Hawking

"These facts are in accord with the hypothesis that human social behavior rests on a genetic foundation... The same facts are unfavorable for the competing hypothesis, which has dominated the social sciences for generations, that mankind has escaped its own genes to the extent of being entirely culture bound." E O Wilson

"It is quite entertaining to watch a computer simulation which starts with a strong majority of suckers, a minority of grudgers which is just above the critical frequency, and about the same sized minority of cheats. The first thing that happens is a crash in the population of suckers as the cheats ruthlessly exploit them. The cheats enjoy a soaring population explosion, reaching their peak as the last sucker perishes. But the cheats still have the grudgers to reckon with..." Richard Dawkins

"Complex organisms are not the sum of their genes, nor do genes alone build particular items of anatomy or behavior by themselves. Most genes influence several aspects of anatomy and behavior - as they operate through complex interactions with other genes and their products, and with environmental factors both within and outside the developing organism. We fall into deep error, not just harmless oversimplification, when we speak of genes "for" particular parts or behaviors." Steven Gould

"A society based simply on the gene's law of universal ruthless selfishness would be a very nasty society in which to live. But unfortunately, however much we deplore something, it does not stop it being true." Richard Dawkins

"The practice of war is a straightforward example of a hypertrophied biological predisposition." E O Wilson

"An intelligence knowing at a given instance of time, all forces acting in nature, as well as the momentary positions of all things of which the universe consists, would be able to comprehend the motions of the largest bodies of the world and those of the of the smallest atoms in one single formula... To it, nothing would be uncertain, both future and past would be present before its eyes." Simon De Laplace

"The problems of determinism have been discussed over the centuries. The discussion was somewhat academic, however, as we were far from a complete knowledge of the laws of science, and we didn't know how the initial state of the universe was determined. The problems are more urgent now because there is the possibility that we may find a complete unified theory in as little as twenty years. And we realize that the initial state may itself have been determined by the laws of science." Steven Hawking

"But radical contingency is a fractal principle, prevailing at all scales with great force. At any of the hundred thousand steps in the particular sequence that that actually led to modern humans, a tiny and perfectly plausible variation would have produced a different outcome, making history cascade down a pathway that could never have led to Homo sapiens, or to any self-conscious creature." Steven Gould

"Here then is Darwin's dangerous idea: the algorithmic level is the level which best accounts for the speed of the antelope, the wing of the eagle ... and all the other occasions for wonder in the world of nature. It is had to believe that something as mindless and mechanical as an algorithm could produce such wonderful things. No matter how impressive the products of an algorithm, the underlying process always consists of nothing but a set of individually mindless steps succeeding each other without the help of any intelligent supervision..." Daniel Dennett

"Best are all things as the will Of God ordained them, his creating hand Nothing imperfect or deficient left Of all that he created, much less man. Or ought that might his happy state secure, Secure from outward force; within himself The danger lies, yet lies within his power: Against his will he can receive no harm. But God left free the will, for what obeys Reason, is free." Milton

"Central to our feelings of awareness is the sensation of the progression of time. We seem to be moving every forward, from a definite past to an uncertain future… More often, we feel ourselves to be helpless spectators - perhaps thankfully relieved of responsibility, - as, inexorably, the scope of a determined past edges its way into an uncertain future. Yet physics, as we know it tells a different story. All the successful equations of physics are symmetrical in time. They can be used equally well in one direction of time as in another." Roger Penrose

"You have written this huge book on the system of the world without once mentioning the author of the universe." Napoleon

"Sire, I had no need of that hypothesis." Simon De Laplace

"The insights of the philosophers I studied seemed murky and inconsequential compared to the dazzling successes of physics and mathematics. From time to time since then I have tried to read current work on the philosophy of science. Some of it I found to be written in a jargon so impenetrable that I can only think that it aimed at impressing those who confound obscurity with profundity." Steven Weinberg

"Maybe I'm being a bit harsh on philosophers, but they have not been very kind to me... I have been variously called nominalist, an instrumentalist, a positivist, a realist, and several other ists. The technique seems refutation by denigration: If you can attach a label to my approach, you don't have to say what is wrong with it... I am sure that Einstein, Heisenberg and Dirac didn't worry about whether they were realists or instrumentalists." Steven Hawking

"Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical. Consequently we cannot give any answer to questions of this kind, but can only point out that they are nonsensical." Wittgenstein

"All other inquiries of men regard only matter of fact and existence, and these are evidently incapable of demonstration. Whatever is may not be. No negation of a fact can involve a contradiction. The non-existence of any being, without exception, is as clear and distinct an idea as its existence. The proposition which affirms it not to be, however false, is no less conceivable and intelligible than that which affirms it to be." David Hume

"This throws some light on the question of why logical propositions cannot be confirmed by experience any more than they can be refuted by it. Not only must a proposition of logic be irrefutable by any possible experience, but it must also be nonconfirmable by any possible experience." Wittgenstein

"Geometry however, is not concerned with the relationship of ideas involved in it to objects of experience, but only with the logical connection of these ideas among themselves." Einstein

"The fact that all Mathematics is Symbolic Logic is one of the greatest discoveries of our age; and when this fact has been established, the remainder of the principles of mathematics consists in the analysis of Symbolic Logic itself." Bertrand Russell

"The accompanying papers... related to the same subject, viz. the Laws which affect the Production of Varieties, Races, and Species, contain the results of the investigations of two indefatigable naturalists, Mr. Charles Darwin and Mr. Alfred Wallace. The gentlemen having, independently and unknown to one another, conceived the same very ingenious theory to account for the appearance and perpetuation of varieties and of specific forms on our planet. ... " Sir Charles Lyall and Dr. Hooker, letter to the Linnean Society, 1858

"Nevertheless our joint productions excited very little attention, and the only published notice of them which I can remember was by Professor Haughton of Dublin, whose verdict was that all that was new in them was false, and what was true was old. This shows how necessary it is that any new view should be explained at considerable length in order to arouse public attention." Darwin.

"The fossil record is proving a major embarrassment to evolution. Though there is ample evidence of evolution and adaptation to environment within species, there is not evidence of the gradual change that is supposed to slowly change one species into another." Conservative judge Robert H Bork

"It is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists -- whether through design or stupidity, I do not know -- as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level but are abundant between larger groups. The evolution from reptiles to mammals... is well documented." Steven Gould

"The theory of natural selection is so elegant and powerful as to inspire a kind of faith in it--not blind faith ... But faith nonetheless; there is a point after which one no longer entertains the possibility of encountering some fact that would call the whole theory into question. I must admit to having reached this point. Natural selection has now been shown to plausibly account for so much about life in general and the human mind in particular that I have little doubt that it can account for the rest." Sewall Wright

"Today, Darwin's theory is coming under increasing attack from inside and outside the scientific community... There is no doubt such attacks are going to increase in the years ahead, and eventually they will triumph, leaving Darwin a lifeless corps, a distant memory of a bygone era." Jeremy Rifkin

"Let me lay my cards on the table. If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone ever had, I'd give it to Darwin, ahead of even Newton or Einstein and everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law". Daniel Dennett

"The facts show - so they claim - that the greatest and finest things in the world are the products of ... neither intelligent planning, nor a deity, nor art, but nature and chance. These people ... say the Gods are artificial concepts, corresponding to nothing in nature. All this, my friends, is the theme of experts ... who assume that the kind of gods the laws tell them to believe in do not exist. This is why we get treasonable efforts to convert people to the 'true natural life', which is nothing but a life of conquest over others..." Plato

"According to this orthodoxy, all of the specific content of the human mind originally derives from the ... environment and the social world -- and the evolved architecture of the mind consists solely or predominantly of a small number of general purpose mechanisms that are content-independent... According to this familiar view -- what we have elsewhere called the Standard Social Science Model -- the contents of human minds are primarily (or entirely) free social constructions, and the social sciences are autonomous and disconnected from any evolutionary or psychological foundation." Tooby, Evolutionary Psychology

"If a group of atoms in the presence of energy falls into a stable pattern it will tend to stay that way. The earliest form of natural selection was simply a selection of stable forms and rejection of unstable ones... From this, of course, it does not mean that you can explain the existence of entities as complex as man by exactly the same principles on their own." Richard Dawkins

"I have described two approaches to development. One is global, holistic and dynamic; the other is local, reductionist, and dependent on notions of information, regulation and control. Such a division is not peculiar to developmental biology." John Maynard Smith

"We need only prove that there exists a continuous series of small steps leading from an insect, say a stage beetle, to a mammal, say a stag. By this I mean that starting with the beetle, we could lay out a sequence of hypothetical animals, each one as similar to the previous member as a pair of brothers might be, and the sequence would culminate in a red deer stag." Richard Dawkins

"Local varieties will not spread into other and distant regions until they are considerably modified and improved; and when they do spread ... they will appear as if suddenly created there." Darwin

"During early periods of the earth's history, when the forms of life were probably fewer and simpler, the rate of change was probably slower;" Darwin

"Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object of which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life... " Darwin

"This of course is nonsense. Evolution is something that happens to organisms. It is a directionless process that sometimes makes an animal's descendants more complicated, sometimes simpler, and sometimes changes them not at all. We are so steeped in notions of progress and self-improvement that we find it strangely hard to accept this." Matt Ridley

"In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference." Richard Dawkins

"We are ... a relatively minor phenomenon that arises only as a side consequence of a physically constrained starting point... The most salient feature of life is the stability of its bacterial mode, so this is truly the age of bacteria". Steven Gould

"I very, very strongly object to the idea that living creatures can be arranged on a ladder, a kind of phylogenetic scale, with humans at the top. Not only should we not treat humans as being on the top, we should not see the animal kingdom as being layered as we often do". Richard Dawkins

"Nature works by steps. The cells make up first of all simple animals, and then the sophisticated ones, climbing step by step. ...Evolution is the climbing of a ladder from simple to complex by steps, each of which is stable in itself." Jacob Bronowski

"Progress, then, is a property of the evolution of life as a whole by almost any conceivable intuitive standard.... let us not pretend to deny in our philosophy what we know in our hearts to be true." E O Wilson

"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run as least twice as fast as that." The Red Queen

"But multitudinous atoms, swept along in multitudinous courses through infinite time by mutual clashes of their own weight, have come together in every possible way and realized everything that could be formed by their combinations. So it comes about in a voyage of immense duration in which they have experienced every variety and movement of conjunction, has brought together those whose sudden encounter normally forms the starting point of substantial fabrics - earth and sea and sky and the races of living creatures." Lucretius.

"The chance that a functioning cell could evolve in that time can be likened to the probability that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747." Sir Fredrick Hoyle

"If black moths can replace white moths in a century, then reptiles can become birds in a few million years by the smooth and sequential summation of countless changes. The shift in gene frequencies is an adequate model for all evolutionary process -or so the current orthodoxy states." Steven Jay Gould

"Because of the excellence of his essays, (Steven Jay Gould) has come to be seen by non-biologists as the preeminent evolutionary theorist. In contrast, the evolutionary biologists with whom I have discussed his work tend to see him as a man whose ideas are so confused as to be hardly worth bothering with, but as one who should not be publicly criticized because he is at least on our side against the creationists." John Maynard Smith.

"Together, these two processes ... (random genetic drift and natural selection) ... work to mold the genetic constitution of future generations and, ultimately, species, often acting in the same individual. For example, when a child dies from a genetic disease, all the child's genes which do not affect the outcome of the disease will suffer a chance death." Majerus, Amos, Hurst, 'Evolution - The Four Billion Year War'

"Eleazar begat Phinehas, Phinehas begat Abishua, And Abishua begat Bukki, and Bukki begat Uzzi, And Uzzi begat Zerahiah, and Zerahiah begat Meraioth, Meraioth begat Amariah, and Amariah begat Ahitub, And Ahitub begat Zadok, and Zadok begat Ahimaaz, And Ahimaaz begat Azariah, and Azariah begat Johanan." Chronicles

"That one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their actions and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity, that I believe no man, who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it." Isaac Newton.

"Even worse is the mathematical concept of imaginary time... I was savagely attacked by a philosopher of science for talking about imaginary time. He said: How can a mathematical trick like imaginary time have anything to do with the real universe? I think this philosopher was confusing the technical mathematical terms real and imaginary numbers with the way that real and imaginary are used in everyday language." Steven Hawking

"The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." J. B. S. Haldane.

"If the genetic components of human nature did not originate by natural selection, fundamental evolutionary theory is in trouble. At the very least the theory of evolution would have to be altered to account for a new and as yet unimagined from of genetic change in populations." E O Wilson

"Seen in retrospect, evolution as a whole doubtless had a general direction, from simple to complex, from dependence on to relative independence of the environment, to greater and greater autonomy of individuals, greater and greater development of sense organs and nervous systems conveying and processing information about the state of the organism's surroundings, and finally greater and greater consciousness. You can call this direction progress or by some other name." Theodosius Dobzhansky

"If a large extraterrestrial object had not triggered the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago, mammals would still be small creatures, confined to the nooks and crannies of a dinosaur's world, and incapable of evolving the larger size that brains big enough for self-consciousness require... We are glorious accidents of an unpredictable process with no drive to complexity, not the expected results of evolutionary principles..." Steven Gould

"As we shall see, technological evolution may be governed by laws similar to those governing pre-biotic chemical evolution and adaptive co-evolution. The origin of life at a threshold of chemical diversity follows the same logic as a theory of economic take-off at a threshold of diversity of goods and services. Above that critical diversity, new species of molecules, or goods and services, afford niches for yet further new species, which are awakened into existence in an explosion of possibilities." Stuart Kauffmann.

"Science is a search for ever sharper images of physical reality. We need to know what kinds of things populate the material universe... Ultra-Darwinists restrict their lists pretty much to genes, organisms, and populations - acknowledging that species, social systems and ecosystems exist, but not as direct players in the evolutionary arena. In contrast, I see such large-scale systems as absolutely crucial to understanding how the evolutionary process actually works." Niles Eldredge

"At present, workers in these two fields - developmental genetics and complex systems - communicate rather rarely. Developmental geneticists see little need to invoke complex dynamics... Students of complex systems appear to think that development can be best studied by ignoring the facts of biology, and forgetting about the only serious theoretical idea we have - the idea of natural selection." John Maynard Smith

"Modern biology has come to occupy an extreme position in the spectrum of science, dominated by historical explanations in terms of the evolutionary adventures of genes. Physics on the other hand, has developed explanations of different levels of reality, microscopic and macroscopic, in terms of theories appropriate to these levels..." Brian Goodwin

"Theories should be as simple as possible, but not simpler" Einstein.

"Let us then suppose the mind to be as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas; How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast stone, which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer in one word, from experience: in that all our knowledge is founded, and from that it ultimately derives itself." John Locke

"The thousands and thousands of genes that influence human behavior--genes that build the brain and govern neurotransmitters and other hormones, thus defining our 'mental organs' --are here for a reason. And the reason is that they goaded our ancestors into getting their genes into the next generation. If the theory of natural selection is correct, then essentially everything about the human mind should be intelligible in these terms. The basic ways we feel about each other, the basic kinds of things we think about each other and say to each, are with us today by virtue of their past contribution to genetic fitness." Sewall Wright

"As an enthusiastic Darwinian, I have been dissatisfied with explanations which my fellow enthusiasts have offered for human behavior. They have tried to look for 'biological advantages' in various attributes of human civilization... The argument that I shall advance, surprising as it may seem ... is that for an understanding of the evolution of modern man, we must begin by throwing out the gene as the sole basis of our ideas on evolution." Richard Dawkins

"The forces of human destiny are foursome and fearsome, demonic parental programming, abetted by the inner voice the ancients called the Daemon, constructive parental programming, aided by the thrust of life called Phuis long ago, external forces, still called fate, and independent aspiration, for which the ancients had no human name..." Eric Berne

"While ritual, emotion and reasoning are all significant aspects of human nature, the most nearly unique human characteristic is the ability to associate abstractly and to reason. Curiosity and the urge to solve problems are the emotional hallmarks of our species; and the most characteristically human activities are mathematics, science, technology, music and the arts... " Carl Sagan

"Human evolution began when the African climate changed to drought: the lakes shrank, and the forests thinned out to savanna. And evidently it was very fortunate for the forerunner of man that he was not well adapted to these conditions. For the environment extracts a price for the survival of the fittest; it captures them." Jacob Bronowski

"The evolution of anatomical adaptations in the hominids could not have kept pace with these abrupt climate changes, which would have occurred within the lifetimes of single individuals. Still, these incremental environmental fluctuations could have promoted the incremental accumulation of mental abilities that conferred greater behavioral flexibility." William Calvin

"Human social evolution proceeds along the dual track of inheritance: cultural and biological. Cultural evolution is Lamarckian and very fast, whereas biological evolution is Darwinian and usually very slow." E O Wilson

"What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty in form, in moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! That beauty of the world! That paragon of animals!" Shakespeare

"With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway about the flux." Bertrand Russell

"How did the hominids come to be the kind of man that I honor: dexterous, observant, thoughtful, passionate, able to manipulate in the mind the symbols of language and mathematics both, the visions of art and geometry and poetry and science?" Jacob Bronowski

"It is even possible that that man's swollen brain, and his predisposition to reason mathematically, evolved as a mechanism of ever more devious cheating, and ever more penetrating detection of cheating." Richard Dawkins

"Both before and after Darwin, a common view among philosophers and scientists has been that the human mind resembles a blank slate, virtually free of content until written on by the hand of experience. According to Aquinas, there is "nothing in the intellect which was not previously in the senses." Working within this framework, the British Empiricists and their successors produced elaborate theories about how experience, refracted through a small handful of innate mental procedures, inscribed content onto the mental slate. David Hume's view was typical, and set the pattern for many later psychological and social science theories". Tooby, Evolutionary Psychology

"Objects have no discoverable connection together; nor is it from any other principle but custom operating upon imagination, that we can draw any inference from the appearance of one to the existence of the other". Hume

"These long chains of perfectly simple and easy reasonings by means of which geometers are accustomed to carry out their most difficult demonstrations had led me to fancy that everything that can fall under human knowledge forms a similar sequence; and that so long as we avoid accepting as true what is not so, and always preserve the right order of deduction of one thing from another, there can be nothing too remote to be reached in the end, or to well hidden to be discovered." Descartes

"For Descartes, after all, the difference was absolute and metaphysical: animals were just mindless automa; we have souls. Descartes and his followers have suffered calumny ... at the hands of animal lovers who have deplored his claim that animals have no souls. More theoretically minded critics have deplored his faintheartedness from the opposite pole: How could such a sound, ingenious mechanist flinch so badly when it came to making an exception for humanity? Daniel Dennett  

"I suggest that the neocortex is not primarily or exclusively a device for tool-making, bipedal walking, fire-using, warfare, hunting, gathering, or avoiding savanna predators. None of these postulated functions alone can explain its explosive development in our lineage... The neocortex is largely a courtship device to attract and retain sexual mates: its specific evolutionary function is to stimulate and entertain other people... " Geoffrey Miller

"There has been no significant biological evolution, or change of DNA, in the last ten thousand years. Thus, our intelligence, our ability to draw the correct conclusions... would have been selected for on the basis of our ability to kill certain animals for food and avoid being killed by them. It is remarkable that mental qualities that were selected for those purposes should have stood us such good stead... There is probably not much survival value in discovering a grand unified theory." Steven Hawking

"An advancement in the standard of morality will certainly give an immense advancement to one tribe over another". Darwin

"There is also a Darwinian reason that we believe in free will: A society in which the individual feels responsible for his or her actions is more likely to work together and to survive to spread its values." Steven Hawking

"Innate censors and motivators exist in the brain that deeply and unconsciously affect our ethical premises; from these roots morality evolved as instinct." E O Wilson

"Evidently that helped to promote (by natural selection) the tendency of all primates to interpose an internal delay in the brain between stimulus and response, until it developed into the full human ability to postpone the gratification of desire." Jacob Bronowski

"If I am right and people are just animals with more than unusually trainable instincts, then it might seem that I am excusing instinctive behavior. When a man kills another man, or tries to seduce a woman, he is just being true to his nature. What a bleak, amoral message. Surely there is a more natural basis for morality in the human psyche than that?" Matt Ridley

"For love is strong as death. Jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame." The Song of Solomon

"These are the central questions that the great philosopher David Hume said are of unspeakable importance: How does the mind work, and beyond that why does it work in such a way and not another, and from these two considerations together what is man's ultimate nature?" E O Wilson

"What in the soul is a passion in the body commonly speaking an action; so that there is no better means of arriving at a knowledge of our passions than to examine the difference which exists between soul and body in order to know to which of the two we must attribute each one of the functions within us." Descartes

"It follows that our mental conditions are simply the symbols in consciousness of the changes which take place automatically in the organism; and that, to take an extreme illustration, the feeling we call volition is not the cause of a voluntary act, but the symbol of that state of the brain which is the immediate cause of this act." T H Huxley

"What, in fact, is the alternative to this through-and-through Darwinian vision of the mind? A last hope for the Darwin-dreaders is simply to deny that what happens to memes when they enter the mind could ever, ever be explained in "reductionistic, mechanistic terms. One way would be to espouse outright Cartesian dualism: the mind just can't be the brain... " Daniel Dennett

"We are now in a position to compare the gradual increase through evolutionary time of both the amount of information contained in the genetic material and the amount of information contained in the brains of organisms. The two curves cross at a time corresponding to a few hundred million years ago... Much of the history of life since the Carboniferous Period can be described as the gradual... dominance of brains over genes." Carl Sagan.

"What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is." Dan Quayle

"Loosing Our Minds to Darwin" Chapter heading of Dennett

"For seeing life is but a motion of limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principle part within; why may we not say, that all automa (engines that move themselves by springs and wheels, as doth a watch) have an artificial life? For what is the heart but a spring; and the nerves but so many strings, and the joints but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body such as was intended by the artificer?" Thomas Hobbes

"Over the years, the technological metaphor used to describe the structure of the human mind has been consistently updated, from blank slate to switchboard to general purpose computer, but the central tenet of these Empiricist views has remained the same. Indeed, it has become the reigning orthodoxy in mainstream anthropology, sociology, and most areas of psychology." Tooby: Evolutionary Psychology

"Thus the history of neuroscience is the history of analogies, of brains as wax writing tablets, a hydraulic systems of pipes and valves, as telegraph and telephone systems, until we arrive at today's most seductive of metaphors, that of the brain as a computer. To me, this analogy is powerful but ultimately flawed." Steven Rose

"The newborn infant is now seen to be wired with awesome precision... This marvelous robot will be launched into the world under the care of its parents... But to what extent does the wiring of the neurons, so undeniably encoded in the genes, preordain the directions that social development will follow?" E O Wilson

"This molecular symphony can hardly be regarded as comparable to the scenario inside a computer. First, and most obviously, the brain is fundamentally a chemical system - even the electricity it generates comes from chemicals. More significantly, beyond the fluxes of ions into and out of the neurons, a wealth of chemical reactions are occurring incessantly in a bustling but closed world inside the cell. These events, some of which determine how the cell will respond to signals in the future, do not have a direct electrical counterpart or any easy analogy with a computer." Susan Greenfield - The Human Brain

"I have shown that those who deplore Artificial Intelligence are also those who deplore the evolutionary accounts of human mentality: if human minds are non-miraculous products of evolution, then they are, in the requisite sense, artifacts, and all their powers must have an ultimately "mechanical" explanation. We are descended from macros and made of macros, and nothing we can do is beyond the power of huge assemblies of macros." Daniel Dennett

"The viewpoint of strong AI, for example, maintains that a 'mind' finds its existence through the embodiment of a sufficiently complex algorithm, as this algorithm is acted out by some objects of the physical world. It is not supposed to matter what actual objects these are. Nerve signals, electric currents along wires, cogs, pulleys, or water pipes would do equally well. The algorithm itself is considered to be all-important." Roger Penrose

"And does not a plant or an animal, which springs from vegetation and generation, bear a stronger resemblance to the world, than does an artificial machine, which arises from reason and design?" Hume

"Every human being is irresistibly impelled to act to act precisely as he does act: in the eternity which preceded his birth, a chain of causes was generated which, operating under the name of motives, makes it impossible that any thought of his mind, or any action of his life, should be otherwise than what it is... The doctrine of Necessity tends to introduce a great change into the established notions of morality... " Shelly (explaining Laplace)

"The great paradox of determinism and free will, which has held the attention of the wisest of philosophers and psychologists for generations, can be phrased in more biological terms as follows: If our genes are inherited, and our environment is a train of physical events set in motion before we were born, how can there be a truly independent agent within the brain? The agent itself is created by the interaction of the genes and the environment. It would appear that our freedom is only a self delusion." E O Wilson

"I now turn to the second problem: If what we do is determined by some grand theory, why should the theory determine that we draw the right conclusions about the universe rather than the wrong ones? Why should anything we say have any validity? My answer to this is based on Darwin's idea of natural selection." Steven Hawking

"In my view, our best hope along this line is to show that the final theory, though not logically inevitable, is logically isolated... that there is no way to isolate it a small amount without the theory leading to logical absurdities. In a logically isolated theory every constant of nature could be calculated from first principles; a small change in the value of any constant would destroy the consistency of the theory. The final theory would be like a piece of fine porcelain, that cannot be warped without shattering." Steven Weinberg

"But when one particular species of events has always, in all instances, been co-joined with another, we make no longer any scruple of foretelling one upon the appearance of another, and of employing that reasoning which can alone assure us of any matter of fact or existence. We then call one object "cause" and the other "effect". David Hume

"The procedure of induction consists of accepting as true the simplest law that can be reconciled with our experiences. This procedure, however, has no logical justification but only a psychological one." Wittgenstein

"The world of Gods is as chaotic as our mortal world. What galls, is that while still sound of mind, one would by heading words of prophets, plunge himself into a depth of ruin..." Euripides

"What is the pragmatic difference between asserting that a system or state of affairs is undetermined and that a system is so complexly determined that no predictions can be reliably made?" Sydney Hook

"Yes, my guard stood hard when abstract threats/ Too noble to neglect/ Deceived me into thinking I had something to protect/ Good and bad, I define these terms/ Quite clear no doubt, somehow. Ah, but I was so much older then,/ I'm younger than that now." Bob Dylan

"It has been proven to us by experience that if we would have true knowledge we must quit the body - the soul in herself must behold things in themselves; and then we shall attain the wisdom which we desire... " Plato

"Is mathematics invention or discovery? When mathematicians come upon their results are they just producing elaborate mental constructions that have no actual reality... or are mathematicians really uncovering truths which are, in fact, already 'there' - truths whose existence is quite independent of the mathematician's activities? The view that mathematical concepts could exist in such a timeless, ethereal sense was put forward in ancient times by the great Greek philosopher Plato." Roger Penrose

"It might at first be thought that the proposition 7 + 5 = 12 is a mere analytical judgment... according to the law of contradiction... But on closer examination... the concept of twelve is by no means thought merely by thinking of the combination of seven and five." Kant

"From the fact that one can think of the sum of seven and five without necessarily thinking of twelve, it by no means follows that the proposition '7 + 5 + 12' can be denied without self-contradiction." A J Ayer

"But the essential point about an equation is that it is not necessary in order to show that the two expressions connected by the sign of equality have the same meaning, since this can be seen from the two expressions themselves." Wittgenstein

"How can it be that mathematics, being after all a product of human thought which is independent of experience, is so admirably appropriate to the objects of reality? Is human reason, then, without experience, merely by taking thought, able to fathom the properties of real things?" Einstein

"The point of mathematics is that in it we have always got rid of the particular instance, and even of any particular sorts of entities. So that for example, no mathematical truths apply merely to fish, or merely to stones, or merely to colors. So long as you are dealing with pure mathematics, you are in the realm of complete and absolute abstraction. ... Mathematics is thought moving in the sphere of complete abstraction from any particular instance of what it is talking about." Alfred Whitehead

"Well if six, turned out to be nine, I don't mind, I don't mind" Jimmy Hendrix

"No more fuzzy math where four plus three 'feels like' seven. It is seven." Dan Quayle

"The effort to understand the universe lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy." Steven Weinberg

"Knowest thou it, because thou wast then born? Or because the number of thy days is great?" The Book of Job

"What is truth? How do we form our judgements as to what is true and what is untrue about the world? Are we simply following some algorithm - no doubt favored over other less effective possible algorithms by the powerful process of natural selection? Or might there be some other, possibly non-algorithmic route - perhaps intuition, instinct or insight - to the divining of truth?" Roger Penrose

"These a priori ideas are utilized by the faculty of understanding as the way of attempting to organize and make sense of the information provided by the faculty of imagination." Kant

"If we take in our hand any volume - of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance- let us ask. Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning containing matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion." David Hume

"So to it is impossible that for there to be a propositions of ethics. Propositions can express nothing that is higher." Wittgenstein

We can now see why it is impossible for finding a criterion for determining the validity of ethical judgements. It is not because they have an 'absolute' validity which is mysteriously independent of ordinary sense experience, but because they have no objective validity whatsoever... And we have seen that sentences which simply express moral judgements do not say anything." A J Ayer

"Ye eat thereof, your eyes shall seem so clear, Knowing both good and evil, as they know." Milton

"It seems to me that there is a fundamental conflict, as revealed by the Godel (-Turing) theorem, between mathematical understanding and purely computational processes. There is no obstruction to our mathematical understanding being the product of evolution provided that the physical laws with which natural selection operates are not of an extremely computational nature." Roger Penrose

"What Godel's theorem offers the romantically inclined is a similarly dramatic proof of the specialness of the human mind. Godel's theorem defines a deed, it seems, that a genuine human mind can perform but that no impostor, no mere algorithm controlled robot, could perform. The technical details of Godel's proof itself need not concern us; no mathematician doubts its soundness. The controversy all lies in how to harness the theory to prove anything about the nature of mind." Daniel Dennett

"As an evolutionary biologist, I have learned over the years that most people do not want to see themselves as lumbering robots programmed to ensure the survival of their genes. I don't think they will want to see themselves as digital computers either. To be told by someone with impeccable scientific credentials that they are nothing of the kind can only be pleasing." John Maynard Smith

"On two occasions I have been asked (by members of Parliament), 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." Charles Babbage

"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons." Popular Mechanics, 1949

"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." Ken Olson, founder of Digital Equipment Corp.

"640K ought to be enough for anybody." Bill Gates, 1981

"Most of what is unusual about man can be summed up in one word: 'culture'. I use the word not in a snobbish sense, but as a scientist uses it. Cultural transmission is analogous to genetic transmission in that, although basically conservative, it can give rise to a form of evolution." Richard Dawkins

"The same conclusion may be extended to man; the intellect must have been all-important to him, even at a very remote period, as enabling him to invent and use language, to make weapons, tools, traps, etc. whereby with the aid of his social habits, he long ago became the most dominant of all living creatures." Darwin

"And that series of inventions, by which man from age to age has remade his environment, is a different kind of evolution - not biological but cultural evolution." Jacob Bronowski

"The theory of population genetics and experiments on other organisms can show that substantial changes can occur in less than 100 generations, which for man reaches back only to the time of the Roman Empire... The question of interest, then, is the extent to which the hereditary qualities of the hunter-gatherer existence have influenced the course of subsequent cultural evolution." E O Wilson

"The brain does much more than recollect. It compares, synthesizes, analyzes, generates abstractions. We must figure out much more than our genes can know. That is why the brain library is some ten thousand times larger than the gene library. Our passion for learning, evident in the behavior of every toddler, is the tool for our survival." Carl Sagan

"A great stride in the development of the intellect will have followed, as soon as the half-art and half-instinct of language came into use; for the continued use of language will have reacted on the brain and produced an inherited effect; and this again will have reacted on the improvement of language... The largeness of the brain in man relatively to his body, compared with the lower animals, may be attributed in chief part to the early use of some simple form of language,- that wonderful engine which affixes signs to all sorts of objects and qualities, and excites trains of thought which would never arise from the mere impression of the senses, or if they did arise could not be followed out." Darwin

"The development of the moral qualities is a more interesting problem. The foundation lies in the social instincts, including under this term the family ties. These instincts are highly complex, and in the case of the lower animals give special tendencies towards certain definite actions... " Darwin

"When we study the sage grouse or elephant seals in their natural habitat we can be fairly sure that they are striving to maximize their long-term reproductive success. But it is much more difficult to make the same claim for human beings. People strive for something, certainly, but it is usually money, power security of happiness. The fact that they do not translate these into babies is raised as evidence against the whole evolutionary approach to human affairs." Matt Ridley

"I believe that the human mind is constructed in a way that locks it inside this fundamental constraint and forces it to make choices with a purely biological instrument. If the brain evolved by natural selection, even the capacities to select particular esthetic judgments and religious beliefs must have arisen by the same mechanistic process." E O Wilson

"For moral philosophy is nothing else but the science of what is good, and evil, in the conversation, and society of mankind. Good, and evil, are names that signify our appetites and aversions; which in different tempers, customs, and doctrines of men are different." Hobbes

"For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil" Ecclesiastes

Glendower: "I can call up spirits from the vasty deep" Hotspur: "Why so can I, or so can any man, But will they come when you do call for them?" Shakespeare

"In school and in society, similar factors operate. "Good" is that for which one is praised; "bad", that for which one is frowned upon or punished... Indeed, the fear of disapproval and the need for approval seem to be the most powerful and almost exclusive motivation for ethical judgment." Erich Fromm

"The high standard of our intellectual powers and moral disposition is the greatest difficulty which presents itself, after we have been driven to this conclusion on the origin of man. But every one who admits the principle of evolution, must see that the mental powers of the higher animals, which are the same in kind with those of man, though so different in degree, are capable of advancement." Darwin

"The consequences of genetic history cannot be chosen by legislatures. Above all, for our own physical well-being if nothing else, ethical philosophy must not be left in the hands of the merely wise." E O Wilson

"Then I presently become aware that while I can will a lie, I can by no means will that lying should be a universal law. For with such a law there would be no promises at all... I do not, therefore, need any far reaching penetration to discern what I have to do in order that my will may be morally good... I only ask myself: Canst thou also will that thy maxim should be universal law? If not, then it must be rejected..." Kant

"It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words. Ethics is transcendental. When an ethical law of the form, 'Thou shalt... ', is laid down, one's first thought is, 'And what if I do not do it?' " Wittgenstein

"Philosophers since Plato have attempted to organize these imperatives into a single rationally defensible and universal system of ethics, so far without achieving anything approaching consensus. Mathematics and physics is the same for everyone everywhere, but ethics has not yet settled into a similar reflective equilibrium." Daniel Dennett

"The belief in God has often been advanced as not only the greatest, but the most complete of all the distinctions between man and the lower animals. It is however impossible, as we have seen, to maintain that this belief is innate or instinctive in man. On the other hand a belief in all-pervading spiritual agencies seems to be universal; and apparently follows from a considerable advance in man's reason, and from a still greater advance in his faculties of imagination, curiosity and wonder." Darwin

"I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church. All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit." Thomas Paine

"Does that mean that religious texts are worthless as guides to ethics? Of course not. They are magnificent sources of insight into human nature, and into the possibilities of ethical codes" Daniel Dennett

"If religions are fundamentally silly, why is it that so many people believe in them? ... All successful religions seem at their nucleus to make an unstated and perhaps even unconscious resonance with the prenatal experience." Carl Sagan

"So it appears that some of the most baffling of religious practices in history might have an ancestry passing in a straight line back to the ancient carnivorous habits of humankind." E O Wilson

"These are some of the reasons why the idea of God is copied so readily by successive generations of individual brains. God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture." Richard Dawkins

"The Gods are first, and that advantage use on our beliefs that all from them appears. I question it, for this Earth I see, warmed by the sun, producing every kind; them nothing." Milton

"Life swings like a pendulum backwards and forwards between pain and ennui... After man has transformed all pains and torments into the conception of hell, there remained nothing for heaven except ennui... As want is the constant scourge of the people, so ennui is the scourge of the fashionable world." Schopenhauer

"Daily life is a compromised blend of posturing for the sake of role-playing and of varying degrees of self-revelation. Under these stressful conditions even the "true" self cannot be precisely defined... Little wonder that the identity crisis is a major source of modern neuroticism, and that the urban middle class aches for a return to a simpler existence." E O Wilson

"Each person decides in early childhood how he will live and how he will die... His trivial behavior may be decided by reason, but his important decisions have already been made: what kind of person he will marry, how many children he will have, what kind of bed he will die in... It is incredible to think, at first, that man's fate, all his nobility and all his degradation, is decided by a child no more than six years old, and usually three... (but) it is very easy to believe by looking at what is happening in the world today, and what happened yesterday, and seeing what will happen tomorrow." Erich Berne

"This kind of science goes by the name of Darwinian history, and it has been greeted with predictable ridicule by real historians. For them, wealth concentration requires no further explanation. For Darwinians, it must once have been (or must still be) the means to a reproductive end: no other currency counts in natural selection." Matt Ridley

"History is not events, but people. And it is not just people remembering, it is people acting and living their past in the present. History is the pilot's instant act of decision, which crystallizes all the knowledge, all the science, all that has been learned since man began." Jacob Bronowski

"This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune - often the surfeit of our own behavior - we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon and the stars; as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence." Shakespeare

"Advertising signs they con you/ Into thinking you’re the one/ That can do what's never been done/ That can win what's never been won/ Meantime life outside goes on/ All around you." Bob Dylan

"Vanity of vanities saith the Preacher: all is vanity… For what profit hath man of all his labor which he taketh under the sun? … For all his days are sorrows, and his travail grief…" Ecclesiastes

"For I am well aware that scarcely a single point is discussed in this volume on which facts cannot be adduced, often apparently leading to conclusions directly opposite to those at which I have arrived." Darwin

"A habit of basing convictions upon evidence, and of giving to them only that degree or certainty which the evidence warrants, would, if it became general, cure most of the ills from which the world suffers." Bertrand Russell

"At any one moment one is presented with a wide variety of innovative ideas that might be followed up: not only astrology and such, but many ideas much closer to the main stream of science, and others that are squarely within the scope of modern scientific research. It does no good to say that all these ideas must be thoroughly tested; there is simply no time... Even if I dropped everything else in my life, I could not begin to give all of these ideas a fair hearing." Steven Weinberg

"I therefore take the view, which has been described as simple minded or naïve, that a theory of physics is just a mathematical model that we use to describe the results of observations. A theory is a good theory if it is an elegant model, if it describes a wide class of observations, and if it predicts the results of new observations. Beyond that, it makes no sense to ask if it corresponds to reality." Steven Hawking

"For whether I am awake or dreaming, it remains true that two plus three make five, or that a square has but four sides. Nor does it seem possible that truths so apparent can ever fall under a suspicion of falsity." Descartes

"What I am advocating is a point of view, a way of looking at familiar facts and ideas, and a way of asking new questions about them. ...I am not trying to convince anyone of the truth of any factual proposition. Rather, I am trying to show the reader a way of seeing biological facts." Richard Dawkins

"When I am judging a theory, I ask myself whether, if I were God, I would have arranged the world in such a way." Einstein

"Or does Darwin's idea turn out to be, in the end, just what we need in our attempt to preserve and explain the values we cherish? I have completed my case for the defense: the Beast is, in fact, a friend of Beauty, and indeed quite beautiful in its own right. You be the judge." Daniel Dennett

"Once we realized that there are two separate hierarchies of biological systems in the real world, we were free to look for connections between the two systems... We sent our paper to the journal Evolution - which seemed the logical place. It was rejected by return mail, with the editorial comment that Evolution publishes papers on experimental and theoretical evolutionary biology, and not on philosophy." Niles Eldredge

"And I am infinitely saddened to find myself suddenly surrounded in the west by a sense of terrible loss of nerve, a retreat from knowledge into - into what? Into Zen Buddhism; into falsely profound questions about; Are we not really just animals at the bottom; into extra-sensory perception and mystery. They do not lie along the line of what we are now able to know if we devote ourselves to it: an understanding of man himself. We are nature's unique experiment to make the rational intelligence sounder than reflex. Knowledge is our destiny. Self-knowledge, at last bring together the experience of the arts and the explanations of science, waits ahead of us." Jacob Bronowski

"The price of these failures has been a loss of moral consensus, a greater sense of helplessness about the human condition. ... The intellectual solution to of the first dilemma can be achieved by a deeper and more courageous examination of human nature that combines the findings of biology with those of the social sciences." E O Wilson

"Yet science seems to have driven us to accept that we are all merely small parts of a world governed in full detail ... by very precise mathematical laws. Our brains themselves, which seem to control all our actions, are also to be ruled by these same precise laws. The picture has emerged that all this precise physical activity is, in effect, nothing more than the acting out of some vast (perhaps probabilistic) computation - and, hence our brains and our minds are to be understood solely in terms of such computations." Roger Penrose

"The world was all before them. Where to choose/ Their place of rest, and providence their guide/ They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow/ Through Eden took their solitary way." Milton

"There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries." Shakespeare

Revised: 3 Nov 1999