Not all historians of philosophy have the same goals and attitudes, and I for one see no good reason for disqualifying any of the contenders. Some insist on placing their thinkers in the historical co...
One cannot learn all about what it’s like to run a marathon by interviewing only those who drop out—but one can learn something.
One of the surprising discoveries of modern psychology is how easy it is to be ignorant of your own ignorance.
People who want to study religion usually have an ax to grind. They either want to defend their favorite religion from its critics or want to demonstrate the irrationality and futility of religion, an...
The real danger, I think, is not that machines more intelligent than we are will usurp our role as captains of our destinies, but that we will over-estimate the comprehension of our latest thinking to...
This is natural selection, plain as day: the islanders have a simple rule: if it returns from the sea intact, copy it! They may have considerable comprehension of the principles of naval architecture...
You can’t change your beliefs as an act of will, in the way you can decide to improve your skills with chainsaw or keyboard.
Human beings are actually more closely related to the two species of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes, the familiar chimp, and Pan paniscus, the rare, smaller pygmy chimp or bonobo) than those chimpanzees...
Is he a dread genetic determinist, or a dread environmental determinist? He is neither, of course, for both these species of bogeyman are as mythical as werewolves. By increasing the information we ha...
We can now expose perhaps the most common misunderstanding of Darwinism: the idea that Darwin showed that evolution by natural selection is a procedure for producing Us. Ever since Darwin proposed his...
We have a better product than soap or automobiles. We have eternal life. —Reverend Jim Bakker8
We live in a world that is subjectively open. And we are designed by evolution to be informavores, epistemically hungry seekers of information, in an endless quest to improve our purchase on the world...
Words, I will argue, are the best example of memes, culturally transmitted items that evolve by differential replication—that is, by natural selection.
[...] нормалното положение на нещата за всяка живо същество, което се размножава, е такова, че при всяко поколение се ражда по-многобройно потомство, отколкото е възможно да се възпроизведе. Иначе каз...
Determinism, the idea that the facts at one moment in time—the location, mass, direction, and velocity of every particle—determine what happens in the next moment, and so on, forever.
F you can approach the world’s complexities, both its glories and its horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only just scratched the s...
A mountain climber foolishly climbing alone slips off a precipice and finds himself dangling at the end of his safety rope, a thousand feet above a ravine. Unable to climb the rope or swing to a safe...
Americans are notoriously ill-informed about evolution. A recent Gallup poll (June 1993) discovered that 47 percent of adult Americans believe that Homo sapiens is a species created by God less than t...
As Dawkins goes on to say (p. 316), The one thing that makes evolution such a neat theory is that it explains how organized complexity can arise out of primeval simplicity. This is one of the key stre...
As the comedian Emo Phillips once said, When I was a child, I used to pray to God for a bicycle. But then I realized that God doesn’t work in that way—so I stole a bike and prayed for forgiveness!
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