Quotes
List here any quote, from Richard Dawkins's book The Selfish Gene. Quotes that inspire you, or give you a strong visual image, or maybe you just admire the author's use of words ... poetic, lyrical, straightforward, cultural, etc ...
We are reading The Selfish Gene in celebration of Richard Dawkins's birthday: March 26, 1971. "By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out." Richard Dawkins: the hidden benefit of Covid is science that could change our world Learn more about genetics: The Gene - Ken Burns Documentary
Presumably there is indeed no purpose in the ultimate fate of the cosmos, but do any of us really tie our life’s hopes to the ultimate fate of the cosmos anyway? Of course we don’t; not if we are sane. Our lives are ruled by all sorts of closer, warmer, human ambitions and perceptions. To accuse science of robbing life of the warmth that makes it worth living is so preposterously mistaken, so diametrically opposite to my own feelings and those of most working scientists, I am almost driven to despair of which I am wrongly suspected.
ReplyDeleteIf you push novelty of language and metaphor far enough, you can end up with a new way of seeing.
ReplyDeleteI have long felt that biology ought to seem as exciting as a mystery story, for a mystery story is exactly what biology is . . .
ReplyDelete. . . if only the individuals in a group had the gift of foresight they could see that in the long run their own best interests lay in restraining their selfish greed, to prevent the destruction of the whole group.
ReplyDeleteHumanity needs a lesson in humility.
ReplyDeleteThere are more possible games of chess than there are atoms in the galaxy.
ReplyDeleteIt seems that some people, educationally over-endowed with the tools of philosophy, cannot resist poking in their scholarly apparatus where it isn’t helpful.
ReplyDeleteObviously it is vitally important in the war of attrition that individuals should give no inkling of when they are going to give up. Anybody who betrayed, by the merest flicker of a whisker, that he was beginning to think of throwing in the sponge, would be at instant disadvantage. If, say, whisker-flicking happened to be a reliable sign that retreat would follow within one minute, there would be a very simple winning strategy: ‘If your opponent’s whiskers flicker, wait one more minute, regardless of what your previous plans for giving up might have been. If your opponent’s whiskers have not yet flickered, and you are within one minute of the time when you intend to give up anyway, give up immediately and don’t waste any more time. Never flicker your own whiskers.’ So natural selection would quickly penalize whisker-flickering and any analogous betrayal of future behavior. The poker face would evolve.
ReplyDeleteA woman could not invest fully in her grandchildren if she went on having children of her own. Therefore genes for becoming reproductively infertile in middle age became more numerous, since they were carried in the bodies of grandchildren whose survival was assisted by grandmotherly altruism.
ReplyDeleteThis is a possible explanation of the evolution of the menopause in females.
If there is a human moral to be drawn, it is that we must teach our children altruism, for we cannot expect it to be part of their biological nature.
ReplyDeleteSince one male can theoretically produce enough sperms to service a harem of 100 females we might suppose that females should outnumber males in animal populations by 100 to 1. Other ways of putting this are that the male is more ‘expendable’, and the female is more ‘valuable’ to the species.
ReplyDeleteThe behavior of lovers is oscillating like the moon, and unpredictable as the weather.
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