Evolutionary Biologist Quotes

E. O. Wilson, the Harvard entomologist and evolutionary biologist, is reputed to have said of socialism: “Great idea. Wrong species.” Any system that is built on a false understanding of human nature is doomed to fail.

The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976 coined the term ‘meme’ for a unit of cultural imitation.

Evolutionary biologists now reckon that the six to seven billion people now living share the same small number of ancestors living two or three thousand years ago. These circumstances make nonsense of anybody’s pretensions to find a pure racial ancestry.

In her memoir of living among the Bushmen, The Old Way: A Story of the First People, my friend Liz lovingly invokes an image first coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins: “You are standing beside your mother, holding her hand. She is holding her mother’s hand, who is holding her mother’s hand. . . . ” Eventually the line stretches three hundred miles long and goes back five million years, and the clasping hand of the ancestor looks like that of a chimpanzee.

Because mankind can circumvent evolutionary law, it is incumbent upon him, say evolutionary biologists to develop another law to abide by if he wishes to survive, to not outstrip his food base. He must learn restraint. He must derive some other, wiser way of behaving toward the land. He must be more attentive to the biological imperatives of the system of sun-driven protoplasm upon which he, too, is still dependent. Not because he must, because he lacks inventiveness, but because herein is the accomplishment of the wisdom that for centuries he has aspired to. Having taken on his own destiny, he must now think with critical intelligence about where to defer.

A century ago, people laughed at the notion that we were descended from monkeys. Today, the individuals most offended by that claim are the monkeys.

In science's pecking order, evolutionary biology lurks somewhere near the bottom, far closer to phrenology than to physics. For evolutionary biology is a historical science, laden with history's inevitable imponderables. We evolutionary biologists cannot generate a Cretaceous Park to observe exactly what killed the dinosaurs; and, unlike "harder" scientists, we usually cannot resolve issues with a simple experiment, such as adding tube A to tube B and noting the color of the mixture.

Evolutionary biologists have identified a rule they call the life/dinner principle. A predator puts less effort into the chase than its prey: if the hunter fails it loses only its dinner, if the hunted fails it loses its life.

file. “Not surprising. It’s not widely accepted, but it’s a popular theory among evolutionary biologists.” “Popular theory for what?” “The Great Leap Forward.” Kate recognized David’s confusion and continued before he could speak. “The

One emerging view of Homo sapiens among evolutionary biologists is that he has built a trap for himself by clinging to certain orthodoxies in a time of environmental emergency. A belief in cultural progress, for example, or in the propriety of a social animal’s quest for individual material wealth is what has led people into the trap, or so goes the thinking. To cause the trap to implode, to disintegrate, humanity has to learn to navigate using a reckoning fundamentally different from the one it’s long placed its faith in. A promising first step to take in dealing with this trap might be to bring together wisdom keepers from traditions around the world whose philosophies for survival developed around the same uncertainty of a future that Darwin suggested lies embedded in everything biological. Such wisdom keepers would be people who are able to function well in the upheaval of any century. Their faith does not lie solely with pursuing technological innovation as an approach to solving humanity’s most pressing problems. Their solutions lie with a profound change in what humans most value.

It turns out that Darwin and a century of biologists following him were wrong in one key respect: evolution does not always plod along at a snail's pace. When natural selection is strong—as occurs when conditions change—evolution can rip along at light speed.

Not only is religion thriving, but it is thriving because it helps people to adapt and survive in the world. In his book Darwin's Cathedral, evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson argues that religion provides something that secular society doesn't: a vision of transcendent purpose. Consequently, religious people have a zest for life that is, in a sense, unnatural. They exhibit a hopefulness about the future that may exceed what is warranted by how the world is going. And they forge principles of morality and charity that simply make them more cohesive, adaptive, and successful than groups whose members lack this binding and elevating force.

As some evolutionary biologists have pointed out, the only way humans have survived amid being able to understand truths

If nutritionists can’t easily determine how one dietary factor affects human health, evolutionary biologists can’t tell what affected the survival of long dead animals.

Humans are not indistinguishable and equal worker ants. E. O. Wilson, the Harvard entomologist and evolutionary biologist, is reputed to have said of socialism: “Great idea. Wrong species.

In her memoir of living among the Bushmen, The Old Way: A Story of the First People, my friend Liz lovingly invokes an image first coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins: “You are standing beside your mother, holding her hand. She is holding her mother’s hand, who is holding her mother’s hand. . . . ” Eventually the line stretches three hundred miles long and goes back five million years, and the clasping hand of the ancestor looks like that of a chimpanzee. I loved picturing one of Octavia’s arms stretching out to meet one of her mother’s arms, and one of her mother’s mother’s arms, and her mother’s mother’s mother’s. . . . Suckered, elastic arms, reaching back through time: an octopus chorus line stretching not just hundreds, but many thousands of miles long. Back past the Cenozoic, the time when our ancestors descended from the trees; back past the Mesozoic, when dinosaurs ruled the land; back past the Permian and the rise of the ancestors of the mammals; back, past the Carboniferous’s coal-forming swamp forests; back past the Devonian, when amphibians emerged from the water; back past the Silurian, when plants first took root on land—all the way to the Ordovician, to a time before the advent of wings or knees or lungs, before the fishes had bony jaws, before blood pumped from a multichambered heart. More than 500 million years ago, the tides would have been stronger, the days shorter, the year longer, and the air too high in carbon dioxide for mammals or birds to breathe. All the earth’s continents huddled in the Southern Hemisphere. And yet still, the arm of Octavia’s ancestor, sensitive, suckered, and supple, would have been recognizable as one of an octopus.

The sciences form a hierarchy. “Physics rests on mathematics, chemistry on physics, biology on chemistry, and, in principle, the social sciences on biology,” wrote evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers.

Because mankind can circumvent evolutionary law, it is incumbent upon him, say evolutionary biologists, to develop another law to abide by if he wishes to survive, to not outstrip his food base. He must learn restraint.

Because mankind can circumvent evolutionary law, it is incumbent upon him, say evolutionary biologists, to develop another law to abide by if he wishes to survive, to not outstrip his food base. He must learn restraint. He must derive some other, wiser way of behaving toward the land. He must be more attentive to the biological imperatives of the system of sun-driven protoplasm upon which he, too, is still dependent. Not because he must, because he lacks inventiveness, but because herein is the accomplishment of the wisdom that for centuries he has aspired to. Having taken on his own destiny, he must now think with critical intelligence about where to defer.

George Williams, the revered evolutionary biologist, describes the natural world as “grossly immoral.” Having no foresight or compassion, natural selection “can honestly be described as a process for maximizing short-sighted selfishness.” On top of all the miseries inflicted by predators and parasites, the members of a species show no pity to their own kind. Infanticide, siblicide, and rape can be observed in many kinds of animals; infidelity is common even in so-called pair-bonded species; cannibalism can be expected in all species that are not strict vegetarians; death from fighting is more common in most animal species than it is in the most violent American cities. Commenting on how biologists used to describe the killing of starving deer by mountain lions as an act of mercy, Williams wrote: “The simple facts are that both predation and starvation are painful prospects for deer, and that the lion's lot is no more enviable. Perhaps biology would have been able to mature more rapidly in a culture not dominated by Judeo-Christian theology and the Romantic tradition. It might have been well served by the First Holy Truth from [Buddha's] Sermon at Benares: “Birth is painful, old age is painful, sickness is painful, death is painful...”” As soon as we recognize that there is nothing morally commendable about the products of evolution, we can describe human psychology honestly, without the fear that identifying a “natural” trait is the same as condoning it. As Katharine Hepburn says to Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, “Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.

evolutionary biologist Ryan Gregory put it, anyone who thinks he or she can assign a function to every letter in the human genome should be asked why an onion needs a genome that is about five times larger than a person’s. Who’s resorting

If “fast” and “slow” animals had parties, writes the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, “some of the fasts would bore everyone with their loud conversation, while others would mutter into their beer that they don’t get any respect.

Winning the Origins Lottery Nontheistic models adhere to a central premise that humans arose by strictly natural unguided steps from a bacterial life-form that sprang into being 3.8 billion years ago. Famed evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala, an advocate for the hypothesis that natural selection and mutations can efficiently generate distinctly different species, nevertheless calculated the probability that humans (or a similarly intelligent species) arose from single-celled organisms as a possibility so small (10-1,000,000) that it might as well be zero (roughly equivalent to the likelihood of winning the California lottery 150,000 consecutive times with the purchase of just one ticket each time).2 He and other evolutionary biologists agree that natural selection and mutations could have yielded any of a virtually infinite number of other outcomes. Astrophysicists Brandon Carter, John Barrow, and Frank Tipler produced an even smaller probability.

Ooh, we’re going to think subtly. We won’t get suckered into simplistic answers, not like those chicken-crossing-the-road neurochemists and chicken evolutionary biologists and chicken psychoanalysts, all living in their own limited categorical buckets.

The great evolutionary biologist J B S Haldane (1892-1964), on being asked by a cleric what biology could say about the Creator, entertainingly replied, 'I'm really not sure, except that the Creator, if he exists, must have an inordinate fondness of beetles.

Religions have provided comfort, community, and moral guidance to countless people, and some biologists argue that a sophisticated deism, toward which many religions are evolving, can be made compatible with an evolutionary understanding of the mind and human nature.

Many biologists claim that our thoughts and feelings of”ethics and meaning” derive only from the proclivities of our nervous systems. Our behaviour and psychology developed by the process of evolution, as did the minds and emotions of animals: so no us and them, just different variations on evolutionary themes. If so, ethics are vapors arising from our synapses, not truths with objective validity outside our own minds.

Evolutionary biologist John Hartung asks us to consider people who are stuck in a position that they might otherwise perceive as unfair or beneath their station (Hartung, 1987). Consider a man who holds a job that he knows does not take full advantage of his talents or a wife who knows that she is more intelligent than her husband. Acting as though your job or your spouse is beneath you could put your employment or your marriage in jeopardy. Your boss might fire you for insubordination. Your spouse might seek someone with whom he or she feels more comfortable and less threatened. The adaptive solution that Hartung proposes is called deceiving down. Deceiving down is not “playing dumb” or pretending to be less than you are. Instead, it involves an actual reduction in self-confidence to facilitate acting in a submissive, subordinate manner.

The altruistic gene doesn’t help just any randomly chosen individual. In a sense, it helps copies of itself in a different individual. Generally speaking, full siblings share 50 percent of their genes, so if I can help more than two of my sisters, even at the expense of sacrificing myself, then, on average, such behavior will be favored by natural selection. Hence the famous quip by the evolutionary biologist J. B. S. Haldane. When asked whether he would give his life to save a drowning brother, he replied: “No, but I would to save two brothers or eight cousins.

Because mankind can circumvent evolutionary law, it is incumbent upon him, say evolutionary biologists, to develop another law to abide by if he wishes to survive, to not outstrip his food base. He must learn restraint. He must derive some other, wiser way of behaving toward the land.

If “fast” and “slow” animals had parties, writes the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, “some of the fasts would bore everyone with their loud conversation, while others would mutter into their beer that they don’t get any respect. Slow animals are best described as shy, sensitive types. They don’t assert themselves, but they are observant and notice things that are invisible to the bullies. They are the writers and artists at the party who have interesting conversations out of earshot of the bullies. They are the inventors who figure out new ways to behave, while the bullies steal their patents by copying their behavior.

perhaps the most astonishing feature of multicellularity is that it evolved independently, and in multiple different species, not just once, but many, many times. It is as if the drive to become multicellular was so forceful and pervasive that evolution leapt over the fence again and again. Genetic evidence suggests this incontrovertibly. Collective existence—above isolation—was so selectively advantageous that the forces of natural selection gravitated repeatedly toward the collective. The transformation from single cells into multicellularity was, as the evolutionary biologists Richard Grosberg and Richard Strathmann wrote, a “minor major transition.

While I call myself an investor, an evolutionary biologist would not be remiss in branding me a “signal decoder.” The only things investors can rely on to assess a company are the signals emitted by it—some direct and others indirect, some comprehensible and others bizarre, some ongoing and others delayed, and some quantitative and others qualitative.

This distinction matters a great deal. Unlike short-term expediency, long-term self-interest, as the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers has shown, often leads to behaviours that are indistinguishable from mutually beneficial cooperation. The reason the large fish does not eat its cleaner fish is not because of altruism but because over the long-term, the cleaner fish is more valuable to it alive than dead. The cleaner fish in turn could cheat by ignoring the ectoparasites and eating bits of the host fish’s gills instead, but its long-term future is better if the big fish becomes a repeat customer.* What keeps the relationship honest and mutually beneficial is nothing other than the prospect of repetition.

Yet evolutionary science has come to see cooperation, and its core emotions of empathy, compassion, and generosity, as fundamental to our species’ survival. What the Dalai Lama was describing—explaining that compassion is in our self-interest—evolutionary biologists have called “reciprocal altruism.” I scratch your back today, and you scratch my back tomorrow

Over the past sixty years a rather impressive assembly of respectable taxonomists and evolutionary biologists have tried to unseat the biological species concept for a wide variety of reasons. Most of them failed, probably because Ernst Mayr is alive, adroit, and articulate at ninety-six years young as I write these words, and most critics are no match for him.

My favorite joke of his occurred when George was telling me about the joys of grandfatherhood. “If I could have figured out how to have grandchildren without having children first, I would have done so.” Later on, I knew just what he meant – high relatedness, no work. Or as Melvin Newton (Huey’s brother) once put it, “You can serve them ice cream for breakfast, what do you care?

Richard Alexander, an evolutionary biologist known for his work on the origins of morality, describes an argument he had with his mentor. Alexander was trying to make a case for pure moral motivations, and he described how he went out of his way to avoid stepping on a line of ants. Isn’t that truly altruistic? And his mentor responded: “It might have been, until you bragged about it.

I had no idea we planned to be so ruthless." "It was not publicized or even discussed with the political arm of the colonization program. Ruthlessness was necessary but wins no votes." "But this is not our world, to treat however we want!" "Visiting here as students of an alien evolutionary tradition would not be either cost-effective or, ultimately, successful. We would inevitably contaminate Garden, or worse yet, become contaminated and bring potentially deadly Gardenian life forms back to Earth. The three continental preserves will be sufficient to allow biologists to study alien life at some point in the future. And if you really thought we would colonize this world without making it 'ours', you'd be far too naive to command this expedition." "I...didn't realize..." "You didn't think about it at all," said the expendable. "The selective voluntary blindness of human beings allows them to ignore the moral consequences of their choices. It has been one of the species' most valuable traits, in terms of the survival of any particular human community." "And you aren't morally blind?" "We see the moral ironies very clearly. We simply don't care.

But from an evolutionary standpoint, there are good grounds to assert that “language” is indeed a natural phenomenon, which originates in the molecular language of the genome and has found, in the course of evolution, its hitherto highest expression in human language (Küppers, 1995). For evolutionary biologists, there is no question as to whether languages below the level of human language exist; the issue is rather about identifying the general conditions under which linguistic structures originate and evolve.

Controversies remain over the details, but today no biologist doubts that evolutionary dynamics like mutualism, kinship, and various forms of reciprocity can select for psychological faculties that, under the right circumstances, can lead people to coexist peacefully.4

{On to contributions to evolutionary biology of 18th century French scientist, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon} He was not an evolutionary biologist, yet he was the father of evolutionism. He was the first person to discuss a large number of evolutionary problems, problems that before Buffon had not been raised by anybody.... he brought them to the attention of the scientific world. Except for Aristotle and Darwin, no other student of organisms [whole animals and plants] has had as far-reaching an influence. He brought the idea of evolution into the realm of science. He developed a concept of the "unity of type", a precursor of comparative anatomy. More than anyone else, he was responsible for the acceptance of a long-time scale for the history of the earth. He was one of the first to imply that you get inheritance from your parents, in a description based on similarities between elephants and mammoths. And yet, he hindered evolution by his frequent endorsement of the immutability of species. He provided a criterion of species, fertility among members of a species, that was thought impregnable.

I recently asked more than seventy eminent researchers if they would have done I their work differently if they had thought Darwin's theory was wrong. The responses were all the same: no. I also examined the outstanding biodiscoveries of the past century: the discovery of the double helix; the characterization of the ribosome: the mapping of genomes; research on medications and drug reactions: improvements in food production and sanitation; the development of new surgeries; and others. I even queried biologists working in areas where one would expect the Darwinian paradigm to have most benefited research, such as the emergence of resistance to antibiotics and pesticides. Here, as elsewhere, I found that Darwin's theory had provided no discernible guidance, but was brought in, after the breakthroughs, as an interesting narrative gloss.

We live broadly according to the tenets of a religion we no longer believe in. We live as if we are creatures of pure free will when philosophers and evolutionary biologists tell us this is largely a fiction. We live as if the memory were a well-built and efficiently staffed left-luggage office. We live as if the soul - or spirit, or individuality, or personality - were an identifiable and locatable entity rather than a story the brain tells itself. We live as if nature and nurture were equal parents when the evidence suggests that nature has both the whip hand and the whip.

What if we looked beyond reproduction altogether? After all, genitalia, contrary to Darwin’s claim, do far more than just fit together mechanically. They signal, symbolize, and titillate—not just to a potential mate, but to other members of a group. In humans, dolphins, and beyond, sex serves richer and more complex purposes than solely the transfer of sperm from one party to another. It can be used to strengthen friendships and alliances, make gestures of dominance and submission, and as part of social negotiations like reconciliation and peacemaking, argues ecologist and evolutionary biologist Joan Roughgarden, author of the 2004 book Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People.

Perhaps if more people realized that coupling in higher organisms is fundamentally about bonding, not only about the drive to reproduce, there would be less prejudice against homosexuality. In fact, homosexuality is natural and common in the animal kingdom. In a 2009 review of the scientific literature, University of California at Riverside biologists Nathan W. Bailey and Marlene Zuk, who advocate more study about the evolutionary impetus for homosexual behavior, state, “The variety and ubiquity of same-sex sexual behavior in animals is impressive; many thousands of instances of same-sex courtship, pair bonding and copulation have been observed in a wide range of species, including mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, insects, mollusks, and nematodes.

Although Galileo was a devout Catholic, it was his conflict with the Vatican, sadly mismanaged on both sides, that lay at the basis of the running battle between science and religion, a tragic and confusing schism which persists unresolved. More than ever today, religion finds its revelatory truths threatened by scientific theory, and retreats into a defensive corner, while scientists go into the attack insisting that rational argument is the only valid criterion for an understanding of the workings of the universe. Maybe both sides have misunderstood the nature of their respective roles. Scientists are equipped to answer the mechanical question of how the universe and everything in it, including life, came about. But since their modes of thought are dictated by purely rational, materialistic criteria, physicists cannot claim to answer the questions of why the universe exists, and why we human beings are here to observe it, any more than molecular biologists can satisfactorily explain why – if our actions are determined by the workings of a selfish genetic coding – we occasionally listen to the voice of conscience and behave with altruism, compassion and generosity. Even these human qualities have come under attack from evolutionary psychologists who have ascribed altruism to a crude genetic theory by which familial cooperation is said to favour the survival of the species. Likewise the spiritual sophistication of musical, artistic and poetic activity is regarded as just a highly advanced function of primitive origins.

All my life I have wondered about the possibility of life elsewhere. What would it be like? Of what would it be made? All living things on our planet are constructed of organic molecules—complex microscopic architectures in which the carbon atom plays a central role. There was once a time before life, when the Earth was barren and utterly desolate. Our world is now overflowing with life. How did it come about? How, in the absence of life, were carbon-based organic molecules made? How did the first living things arise? How did life evolve to produce beings as elaborate and complex as we, able to explore the mystery of our own origins? And on the countless other planets that may circle other suns, is there life also? Is extraterrestrial life, if it exists, based on the same organic molecules as life on Earth? Do the beings of other worlds look much like life on Earth? Or are they stunningly different—other adaptations to other environments? What else is possible? The nature of life on Earth and the search for life elsewhere are two sides of the same question—the search for who we are. In the great dark between the stars there are clouds of gas and dust and organic matter. Dozens of different kinds of organic molecules have been found there by radio telescopes. The abundance of these molecules suggests that the stuff of life is everywhere. Perhaps the origin and evolution of life is, given enough time, a cosmic inevitability. On some of the billions of planets in the Milky Way Galaxy, life may never arise. On others, it may arise and die out, or never evolve beyond its simplest forms. And on some small fraction of worlds there may develop intelligences and civilizations more advanced than our own. Occasionally someone remarks on what a lucky coincidence it is that the Earth is perfectly suitable for life—moderate temperatures, liquid water, oxygen atmosphere, and so on. But this is, at least in part, a confusion of cause and effect. We earthlings are supremely well adapted to the environment of the Earth because we grew up here. Those earlier forms of life that were not well adapted died. We are descended from the organisms that did well. Organisms that evolve on a quite different world will doubtless sing its praises too. All life on Earth is closely related. We have a common organic chemistry and a common evolutionary heritage. As a result, our biologists are profoundly limited. They study only a single kind of biology, one lonely theme in the music of life. Is this faint and reedy tune the only voice for thousands of light-years? Or is there a kind of cosmic fugue, with themes and counterpoints, dissonances and harmonies, a billion different voices playing the life music of the Galaxy? Let

progress—like those cartoons that begin with an ape and end with a man sitting at a computer—now gets lost in a hundred detours and false starts, intersecting paths and dead ends. It is difficult to find the story line in a tangled bush. Evolutionary theory is not threatened by the disappearance of the main highway. On the contrary, from the beginning Darwin insisted on the randomness of mutations, followed by the editing of natural selection, that lead to the emergence of new species. Still, it is disquieting to look around and see a wilderness of discontinuous and crisscrossing tracks. David Pilbeam once published a book called The Ascent of Man. It is not at all clear that he would do so today. Nonetheless, most of us, including evolutionary biologists, continue to search for and construct stories

literary studies share with Moravec a major blind spot when it comes to the significance of embodiment.3 This blind spot is most evident, perhaps, when literary and cultural critics confront the fields of evolutionary biology. From an evolutionary biologist’s point of view, modern humans, for all their technological prowess, represent an eye blink in the history of life, a species far too recent to have significant evolutionary impact on human biological behaviors and structures. In my view, arguments like those that Jared Diamond advances in Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies and Why Sex Is Fun : The Evolution of Human Sexuality should be taken seriously.4 The body is the net result of thousands of years of sedimented evolutionary history, and it is naive to think that this history does not affect human behaviors at every level of thought and action.

Everyone and everything we know and love. Thanks to a virus. We all carry mutations. Genetic mutations can give you laser vision. Or cancer. Or color blindness. Sometimes a mutation is on a DNA strand that doesn't do anything at all. And sometimes-- almost never-- a genetic mutation will cause an entire species to make an evolutionary leap forward. Think about it... a virus with powers. Sounds like something a biologist would want to protect.

Linda continued stubbornly, “Evolution can’t be true, because if humans evolved from apes, then why are there still apes?” “Frankly, Linda, it is exactly that kind of bone-headed statement that demonstrates a complete ignorance of evolutionary processes by the staggeringly misinformed. Humans did not descend from apes, humans and apes shared a common ancestor millions of years ago. Humans and apes are distant cousins, with chimpanzees as our closest cousins sharing roughly ninety-eight percent of our genome, who together share an even earlier common ancestor with gorillas.” “I am not descended from a monkey,” Linda stated hotly. “Humans are created in the image of God and appeared on Earth in our present form. We did not evolve from pond scum!” “You are free to believe that and persist in your ignorance, but as the renowned evolutionary biologist and zoologist, Richard Dawkins, wrote in A Devil’s Chaplain—” “Aha!” Linda burst out, “there you go, admitting it’s the work of the devil.

gene plays a role, are quite tractable, but anything entailing higher dimensionality falls apart. Understanding the genetic makeup of a unit will never allow us to understand the behavior of the unit itself. A reminder that what I am writing here isn’t an opinion. It is a straightforward mathematical property. The mean-field approach is when one uses the average interaction between, say, two people, and generalizes to the group—it is only possible if there are no asymmetries. For instance, Yaneer Bar-Yam has applied the failure of mean-field to evolutionary theory of the selfish-gene narrative trumpeted by such aggressive journalistic minds as Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker, with more mastery of English than probability theory. He shows that local properties fail and the so-called mathematics used to prove the selfish gene are woefully naive and misplaced. There has been a storm around work by Martin Nowack and his colleagues (which include the biologist E. O. Wilson) about the terminal flaws in the selfish gene theory.fn2

Suppose there’s a rooster standing next to you, and there’s a chicken across the street. The rooster gives a sexually solicitive gesture that is hot by chicken standards, and she promptly runs over to mate with him (I haven’t a clue if this is how it works, but let’s just suppose). And thus we have a key behavioral biological question—why did the chicken cross the road? And if you’re a psychoneuroendocrinologist, your answer would be “Because circulating estrogen levels in that chicken worked in a certain part of her brain to make her responsive to this male signaling,” and if you’re a bioengineer, the answer would be “Because the long bone in the leg of the chicken forms a fulcrum for her pelvis (or some such thing), allowing her to move forward rapidly,” and if you’re an evolutionary biologist, you’d say, “Because over the course of millions of years, chickens that responded to such gestures at a time that they were fertile left more copies of their genes, and thus this is now an innate behavior in chickens,” and so on, thinking in categories, in differing scientific disciplines of explanation.

As important as evolutionary theory was when it came to explaining how we all came to be on this planet, it was also used in overtly racist ways, to justify the white Anglo-European male domination of other cultures and genders that had been going on for centuries. Evolutionary theory became a “scientific” way of upholding the status quo. White, Northern European women were deemed to be a step down from men on the evolutionary ladder, followed by Southern Europeans (again with the women a step down from the men), then people of color from countries that early biologists and anthropologists considered “semi-civilized” or “barbaric,” and finally, at the bottom, Native Americans and Africans, whom they considered “savages.”21

(William) Hamilton recast the central ideas (of the evolutionary theory of aging) in mathematical form. Though this work tells us a good deal about why human lives take the course they do, Hamilton was a biologist whose great love was insects and their relatives, especially insects which make both our lives and an octopus’s life seem rather humdrum. Hamilton found mites in which the females hang suspended in the air with their swollen bodies packed with newly hatched young, and the males in the brood search out and copulate with their sisters there inside the mother. He found tiny beetles in which the males produce “and manhandle sperm cells longer than their whole bodies. Hamilton died in 2000, after catching malaria on a trip to Africa to investigate the origins of HIV. About a decade before his death, he wrote about how he would like his own burial to go. He wanted his body carried to the forests of Brazil and laid out to be eaten from the inside by an enormous winged Coprophanaeus beetle using his body to nurture its young, who would emerge from him and fly off. 'No worm for me nor sordid fly, I will buzz in the dusk like a huge bumble bee. I will be many, buzz even as a swarm of motorbikes, be borne, body by flying body out into the Brazilian wilderness beneath the stars, lofted under those beautiful and un-fused elytra [wing covers] which we will all hold over our “backs. So finally I too will shine like a violet ground beetle under a stone.

The Case of the Eyeless Fly The fruit fly has a mutant gene which is recessive, i.e., when paired with a normal gene, has no discernible effect (it will be remembered that genes operate in pairs, each gene in the pair being derived from one parent). But if two of these mutant genes are paired in the fertilised egg, the offspring will be an eyeless fly. If now a pure stock of eyeless flies is made to inbreed, then the whole stock will have only the 'eyeless' mutant gene, because no normal gene can enter the stock to bring light into their darkness. Nevertheless, within a few generations, flies appear in the inbred 'eyeless' stock with eyes that are perfectly normal. The traditional explanation of this remarkable phenomenon is that the other members of the gene-complex have been 'reshuffled and re-combined in such a way that they deputise for the missing normal eye-forming gene.' Now re-shuffling, as every poker player knows, is a randomising process. No biologist would be so perverse as to suggest that the new insect-eye evolved by pure chance, thus repeating within a few generations an evolutionary process which took hundreds of millions of years. Nor does the concept of natural selection provide the slightest help in this case. The re-combination of genes to deputise for the missing gene must have been co-ordinated according to some overall plan which includes the rules of genetic self-repair after certain types of damage by deleterious mutations. But such co-ordinative controls can only operate on levels higher than that of individual genes. Once more we are driven to the conclusion that the genetic code is not an architect's blueprint; that the gene-complex and its internal environment form a remarkably stable, closely knit, self-regulating micro-hierarchy; and that mutated genes in any of its holons are liable to cause corresponding reactions in others, co-ordinated by higher levels. This micro-hierarchy controls the pre-natal skills of the embryo, which enable it to reach its goal, regardless of the hazards it may encounter during development. But phylogeny is a sequence of ontogenies, and thus we are confronted with the profound question: is the mechanism of phylogeny also endowed with some kind of evolutionary instruction booklet? Is there a strategy of the evolutionary process comparable to the 'strategy of the genes'-to the 'directiveness' of ontogeny (as E.S. Russell has called it)?

The scientists not only sanctified human feelings, but also found an excellent evolutionary reason to do so. After Darwin, biologists began explaining that feelings are complex algorithms honed by evolution to help animals make correct decisions. Our love, our fear and our passion aren’t some nebulous spiritual phenomena good only for composing poetry. Rather, they encapsulate millions of years of practical wisdom. When you read the Bible you are getting advice from a few priests and rabbis who lived in ancient Jerusalem. In contrast, when you listen to your feelings, you follow an algorithm that evolution has developed for millions of years, and that withstood the harshest quality-control tests of natural selection. Your feelings are the voice of millions of ancestors, each of whom managed to survive and reproduce in an unforgiving environment.

One feature of our own society that seems decidedly anomalous is the matter of sexual advertisement, As we have seen, it is strongly to be expected on evolutionary grounds that, where the sexes differ, it should be the males that advertise and the females that are drab. Modern western man is undoubtedly exceptional in this respect. It is of course true that some men dress flamboyantly and some women dress drably but, on average, there can be no doubt that in our society the equivalent of the peacock's tail is exhibited by the female, not by the male. Women paint their faces and glue on false eyelashes. Apart from special cases, like actors, men do not. Women seem to be interested in their own personal appearance and are encouraged in this by their magazines and journals. Men's magazines are less preoccupied with male sexual attractiveness, and a man who is unusually interested in his own dress and appearance is apt to arouse suspicion, both among men and among women. When a woman is described in conversation, it is quite likely that her sexual attractiveness, or lack of it, will be prominently mentioned. This is true, whether the speaker is a man or a woman. When a man is described, the adjectives used are much more likely to have nothing to do with sex. Faced with these facts, a biologist would be forced to suspect that he was looking at a society in which females compete for males, rather than vice versa. In the case of birds of paradise, we decided that females are drab because they do not need to compete for males. Males are bright and ostentatious because females are in demand and can afford to be choosy. The reason female birds of paradise are in demand is that eggs are a more scarce resource than sperms. What has happened in modern western man? Has the male really become the sought-after sex, the one that is in demand, the sex that can afford to be choosy? If so, why?

In his history of biology, Ernst Mayr showed that many biologists originally rejected the theory of natural selection because of their belief that a species was a pure type defined by an essence. They could not wrap their minds around the concept that species are populations of variable individuals and that one can blend into another over evolutionary time.36 In this context, the fear of genetically modified foods no longer seems so strange: it is simply the standard human intuition that every living thing has an essence. Natural foods are thought to have the pure essence of the plant or animal and to carry with them the rejuvenating powers of the pastoral environment in which they grew. Genetically modified foods, or foods containing artificial additives, are thought of as being deliberately laced with a contaminant tainted by its origins in an acrid laboratory or factory. Arguments that invoke genetics, biochemistry, evolution, and risk analysis are likely to fall on deaf ears when pitted against this deep-rooted way of thinking.

Lamarck’s Impact So, how could these "favorable variations" occur? Darwin tried to answer this question from the standpoint of the primitive understanding of science at that time. According to the French biologist Chevalier de Lamarck (1744-1829), who lived before Darwin, living creatures passed on the traits they acquired during their lifetime to the next generation. He asserted that these traits, which accumulated from one generation to another, caused new species to be formed. For instance, he claimed that giraffes evolved from antelopes; as they struggled to eat the leaves of high trees, their necks were extended from generation to generation. Darwin also gave similar examples. In his book The Origin of Species, for instance, he said that some bears going into water to find food transformed themselves into whales over time. However, the laws of inheritance discovered by Gregor Mendel (1822-84) and verified by the science of genetics, which flourished in the twentieth century, utterly demolished the legend that acquired traits were passed on to subsequent generations. Thus, natural selection fell out of favor as an evolutionary mechanism.

what about your new way of looking at things? We seem to have wandered rather a long way from that.’ ‘Well, as a matter of fact,’ said Philip, ‘we haven’t. All these camisoles en flanelle and pickled onions and bishops of cannibal islands are really quite to the point. Because the essence of the new way of looking is multiplicity. Multiplicity of eyes and multiplicity of aspects seen. For instance, one person interprets events in terms of bishops; another in terms of the price of flannel camisoles; another, like that young lady from Gulmerg,’ he nodded after the retreating group, ‘thinks of it in terms of good times. And then there’s the biologist, the chemist, the physicist, the historian. Each sees, professionally, a different aspect of the event, a different layer of reality. What I want to do is to look with all those eyes at once. With religious eyes, scientific eyes, economic eyes, homme moyen sensuel eyes . . .’ ‘Loving eyes too.’ He smiled at her and stroked her hand. ‘The result . . .’ he hesitated. ‘Yes, what would the result be?’ she asked. ‘Queer,’ he answered. ‘A very queer picture indeed.’ ‘Rather too queer, I should have thought.’ ‘But it can’t be too queer,’ said Philip. ‘However queer the picture is, it can never be half so odd as the original reality. We take it all for granted; but the moment you start thinking, it becomes queer. And the more you think, the queerer it grows. That’s what I want to get in this book—the astonishingness of the most obvious things. Really any plot or situation would do. Because everything’s implicit in anything. The whole book could be written about a walk from Piccadilly Circus to Charing Cross. Or you and I sitting here on an enormous ship in the Red Sea. Really, nothing could be queerer than that. When you reflect on the evolutionary processes, the human patience and genius, the social organisation, that have made it possible for us to be here, with stokers having heat apoplexy for our benefit and steam turbines doing five thousand revolutions a minute, and the sea being blue, and the rays of light not flowing round obstacles, so that there’s a shadow, and the sun all the time providing us with energy to live and think—when you think of all this and a million other things, you must see that nothing could well be queerer and that no picture can be queer enough to do justice to the facts.’ ‘All the same,’ said Elinor, after a long silence, ‘I wish one day you’d write a simple straightforward story about a young man and a young woman who fall in love and get married and have difficulties, but get over them, and finally settle down.’ ‘Or

he importance and influence of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection can scarcely be exaggerated. A century after Darwin’s death, the great evolutionary biologist and historian of science, Ernst Mayr, wrote, ‘The worldview formed by any thinking person in the Western world after 1859, when On the Origin of Species was published, was by necessity quite different from a worldview formed prior to 1859… The intellectual revolution generated by Darwin went far beyond the confines of biology, causing the overthrow of some of the most basic beliefs of his age.’1 Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin’s biographers, contend, ‘Darwin is arguably the best known scientist in history. More than any modern thinker—even Freud or Marx—this affable old-world naturalist from the minor Shropshire gentry has transformed the way we see ourselves on the planet.’2 In the words of the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, ‘Almost no one is indifferent to Darwin, and no one should be. The Darwinian theory is a scientific theory, and a great one, but that is not all it is… Darwin’s dangerous idea cuts much deeper into the fabric of our most fundamental beliefs than many of its sophisticated apologists have yet admitted, even to themselves.’3 Dennett goes on to add, ‘If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone has ever had, I’d give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton and 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.’4 The editors of the Cambridge Companion to Darwin begin their introduction by stating, ‘Some scientific thinkers, while not themselves philosophers, make philosophers necessary. Charles Darwin is an obvious case. His conclusions about the history and diversity of life—including the evolutionary origin of humans—have seemed to bear on fundamental questions about being, knowledge, virtue and justice.’5 Among the fundamental questions raised by Darwin’s work, which are still being debated by philosophers (and others) are these: ‘Are we different in kind from other animals? Do our apparently unique capacities for language, reason and morality point to a divine spark within us, or to ancestral animal legacies still in evidence in our simian relatives? What forms of social life are we naturally disposed towards—competitive and selfish forms, or cooperative and altruistic ones?’6 As the editors of the volume point out, virtually the entire corpus of the foundational works of Western philosophy, from Plato and Aristotle to Descartes to Kant to Hegel, has had to be re-examined in the light of Darwin’s work. Darwin continues to be read, discussed, interpreted, used, abused—and misused—to this day. As the philosopher and historian of science, Jean Gayon, puts it, ‘[T]his persistent positioning of new developments in relation to a single, pioneering figure is quite exceptional in the history of modern natural science.

Sure. When a behavior occurs, we behavioral biologists ask, “Why did that behavior just happen?” And it turns out that that’s like asking a whole bunch of questions. Part of what we’re asking is, “What occurred in the brain of that individual one second ago?” But we’re also asking, “What were the sensory cues in the environment a minute ago that triggered those neurons?” And we’re also asking, “What did that person’s hormone levels this morning have to do with making him more or less sensitive to those sensory cues that then triggered those neurons?” And then you’re off and running to neuroplasticity—over the course of months, back to childhood, and back to the fetal environment (which turns out to be wildly influential in adult behavior). And then you’re back to genes. If you’re still asking, “Why did that behavior occur?” you’re also asking, “What sort of culture was this person raised in?” Which often winds up meaning, “What were this person’s ancestors doing a couple of hundred years ago, and what were the ecological influences on that?” And finally, you’re asking something about the millions of years of evolutionary pressures. So it’s not just the case that it’s important to look at these things at multiple levels. Ultimately they merge into the same. If you’re talking about the brain, you’re talking about the childhood experiences when the brain was assembled. If you’re talking about genes, you’re implicitly talking about their evolution. All of these are a confluence of influences on behavior that are all interconnected.

Darwin’s Hopes Shattered However, although evolutionists have been making strenuous efforts to find fossils since the middle of the nineteenth century all over the world, no transitional forms have yet been uncovered. All of the fossils, contrary to the evolutionists' expectations, show that life appeared on Earth all of a sudden and fully-formed. One famous British paleontologist, Derek V. Ager, admits this fact, even though he is an evolutionist: The point emerges that if we examine the fossil record in detail, whether at the level of orders or of species, we find – over and over again – not gradual evolution, but the sudden explosion of one group at the expense of another. This means that in the fossil record, all living species suddenly emerge as fully formed, without any intermediate forms in between. This is just the opposite of Darwin's assumptions. Also, this is very strong evidence that all living things are created. The only explanation of a living species emerging suddenly and complete in every detail without any evolutionary ancestor is that it was created. This fact is admitted also by the widely known evolutionist biologist Douglas Futuyma: Creation and evolution, between them, exhaust the possible explanations for the origin of living things. Organisms either appeared on the earth fully developed or they did not. If they did not, they must have developed from pre-existing species by some process of modification. If they did appear in a fully developed state, they must indeed have been created by some omnipotent intelligence. Fossils show that living beings emerged fully developed and in a perfect state on the Earth. That means that "the origin of species," contrary to Darwin's supposition, is not evolution, but creation.

Evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould was diagnosed with a form of cancer that had a median survival time of eight months; he died of a different and unrelated kind of cancer twenty years later.3 Gould subsequently wrote a famous article called “The Median Isn’t the Message,” in which he argued that his scientific knowledge of statistics saved him from the erroneous conclusion that he would necessarily be dead in eight months.

In the University of Texas study, for example, the researchers came up with the theory that big-butted women were better able to forage for food, but they provided no experimental data to back it up. This is a fundamental problem that many biologists have with evolutionary psychology: it doesn’t adhere to the standards of other sciences that study biological evolution.

Müller’s talk echoed his earlier technical publications making the same points. In a provocative technical book, “Origination of Organismal Form,” Müller and biologist Stuart Newman argued that neo-Darwinism has “no theory of the generative.”12 In other words, neo-Darwinism cannot explain what caused new forms of life to arise. In this book, published nearly 150 years after the Origin of Species, Müller and Newman characterized the “origination of organismal form” as an unsolved problem for evolutionary theory. Yet, again, the origin of biological form is precisely what Darwinism, and later neo-Darwinism, claimed to explain. Other evolutionary biologists have echoed this concern. Many now repeat an old aphorism affirming that mutation and natural selection can account for “the survival of the fittest, but not the arrival of the fittest”13—that is, small-scale variations, but not large-scale innovations in biological form.

The evolutionary biologist Joseph Henrich wrote a book called The WEIRDest People in the World. In it, he makes the point that those of us in our Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic culture are complete outliers when compared to most other cultures in world history. For example, when people in our WEIRD culture get married, they tend to go off and set up their own separate household. But that is the dominant pattern in only 5 percent of the twelve hundred societies that have been studied. We often live in nuclear families. That’s the dominant family mode in only 8 percent of human societies. We have monogamous marriages. That’s predominant in only 15 percent of societies. And so on and so on. People who grew up in WEIRD cultures, Henrich finds, are much less conformist than people in most other cultures. They are more loyal to universal ideals and maybe a little less loyal to friends. For example, while most people in Nepal, Venezuela, or South Korea would lie under oath to help a friend, 90 percent of Americans and Canadians do not think their friends have a right to expect such a thing. That’s weird! One of Henrich’s core points is that if we conduct all our experiments using only WEIRD research subjects at Western universities, we shouldn’t use that data to draw wide conclusions about human nature in general.

Evolutionary biologists back up this premise. They describe how our amygdala uses about two thirds of its neurons scanning for threats. As a result, painful and frightening events are more easily stored in our long-term memory than pleasant events. Scientists call this default mechanism a “negativity bias,” and it makes perfect sense. Our very survival depends on being able to screen out potential attacks. “The mind is like Velcro for negative experiences,” says neuropsychologist Rick Hanson, “and Teflon for positive ones.

Having failed to create societies that our young want to grow into, we idealize the stages of youth. Watching the wide-eyed excitement with which babies face every piece of the world, we envy their openness and naivety, while forgetting the fear and frustration that accompany every bit of progress, from standing upright to drawing a stick-figure. The most pernicious bit of idealization is the very widespread view that the best time of one's life is the decade between sixteen and twenty-six, when young men's muscles and young women's skin are at their most blooming. That's due to hormones, and evolutionary biologists will explain that it happens for a reason. But your goal is not to maximize reproduction, whatever may be said of your genes. By describing what is usually the hardest time of one's life as the best one, we make that time harder for those who are going through it. (If I'm torn and frightened now, what can I expect of the times of my life that, they all tell me, will only get worse?) And that is the point. by describing life as a downhill process, we prepare young people to expect – and demand – very little from it.

For example, George J. Romanes, a leading evolutionary biologist and physiologist of the time, went on to say this: “Seeing that the average brain-weight of women is about five ounces less than that of men, on merely anatomical ground we should be prepared to expect a marked inferiority of intellectual power in the former.” These assumptions were by no means unique, as most intellectuals back then were perfectly comfortable embracing an interpretation that suited the status quo. Those “missing five ounces” of women’s brains were thus used to justify the difference in the social status between men and women, cementing the denial of women’s access to higher education or to other rights that might have rendered them independent

we must allow a story to carry us away, as it were, in order to be touched by its import. Science does not look for narrative meaning, so we need not expect from the evolutionary biologist any profound commentary on what the drama of life is really all about.

Neoteny is a term coined by evolutionary biologists to explain the human capacity to perpetuate juvenile characteristics, such as curiosity, play, and imagination, into adult life.

Recognizing the problem, some secularists are searching for ways to salvage an objective status for morality. The favored strategy is to invoke evolutionary psychology. Hardly a week goes by without an article appearing in the popular press claiming that natural selection has explained the origin of this or that moral trait. Typically the argument goes something like this: You Christians claim that it is impossible to have morality without God. Well, we’ve solved that problem. Evolutionary forces can produce empathy, cooperation, mutual aid, and all the other forms of social bonding. These behaviors are selected for because they help secure genetic fitness and promote survival. Voilá, evolution becomes the basis for moral realism. And evolutionary biologists become the new priests. As a New York Times article says, if “morality grew out of behavioral rules shaped by evolution,” then “it is for biologists, not philosophers or theologians, to say what these rules are.”40 But

This book distills forty-plus years of personal struggle, heart-to-heart conversations, and cross-disciplinary research about doubt: why it’s unavoidable; why, in fact, it’s necessary and valuable; and how to live with it and learn from it. The research component is significant, because insights from psychologists, neurologists, evolutionary biologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and even political scientists can help us understand the many interrelated dimensions of our doubt. When we bring their research into conversation with theologians and other scholars of religion, everyone has something to learn.

As evolutionary biologist Scott C. Todd said, “the scientist, as an individual, is free to embrace a reality that transcends naturalism”[

The evolutionary biologist Joseph Henrich wrote a book called The WEIRDest People in the World. In it, he makes the point that those of us in our Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic culture are complete outliers when compared to most other cultures in world history. For example, when people in our WEIRD culture get married, they tend to go off and set up their own separate household. But that is the dominant pattern in only 5 percent of the twelve hundred societies that have been studied. We often live in nuclear families. That’s the dominant family mode in only 8 percent of human societies. We have monogamous marriages. That’s predominant in only 15 percent of societies. And so on and so on. People who grew up in WEIRD cultures, Henrich finds, are much less conformist than people in most other cultures. They are more loyal to universal ideals and maybe a little less loyal to friends. For example, while most people in Nepal, Venezuela, or South Korea would lie under oath to help a friend, 90 percent of Americans and Canadians do not think their friends have a right to expect such a thing. That’s weird!

The London psychoanalyst John Bowlby was one of the first to propose evolutionary functions for low mood. Thanks to conversations with the German ethologist Konrad Lorenz and the English biologist Robert Hinde, he turned an evolutionary eye toward the behaviors of babies separated from their mothers.5 After a short separation, some reconnected with the mother quickly, others acted distant, and a few acted angry. A longer separation led to a reliable sequence: initial wails of protest, followed by silent rocking and huddling in a ball that looks for all the world like an adult in a state of despair.6,7 Bowlby saw that crying motivated mothers to retrieve their infants. He also saw that extended crying would waste energy and attract predators, so if the mother did not return soon, inconspicuous withdrawal would be more useful. These ideas developed into attachment theory,8 which provides the foundation for understanding mother-infant bonding and the pathologies that result when it goes awry. Bowlby deserves recognition as a founder of evolutionary psychiatry for his insight that attachment evolved because it increases the fitness of both mother and baby. More explicitly evolutionary analyses in recent decades have challenged the idea that only secure attachment is normal. In some situations, babies who use avoidant or anxious attachment styles may motivate their mothers to provide more care.9,10,11 If regular smiling and cooing don’t work, it may work better to scream indefinitely when she leaves or to give her the cold shoulder when she returns.

The British evolutionary biologist and Oxford professor Richard Dawkins once said, “DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.” I have always liked that quote. It reflects the utter lack of bias inherent in DNA evidence. It may not know or care, but when it comes to solving murder cases, it sure can tell us a lot.

It is agreed by both game theorists and evolutionary biologists that the prospects for cooperation are far greater when there is a high expectation of repetition than in single-shot transactions. Clay Shirky has even described social capital as ‘the shadow of the future at a societal scale’. We acquire it as a means of signalling our commitment to long-term, mutually beneficial behaviours, yet some businesses barely consider this at all – procurement, by setting shorter and shorter contract periods, may be unwittingly working to reduce cooperation.

Evolutionary dynamics has no need of vast abstract spaces, like all the possible viable animals, DNA sequences, sets of proteins, or biological laws. Better, as the theoretical biologist Stuart A. Kauffman proposes, to think of evolutionary dynamics as the exploration in time by the biosphere of what can happen next: the “adjacent possible.” The same goes for the evolution of technologies, economies, and societies.

Evolutionary biologists tell us we have a “negativity bias” that makes our brains remember negative events more strongly than positive ones. So when we’re feeling lost or discouraged, it can be very hard to conjure up memories and feelings of happiness and ease.

How often have we turned on the television and heard the host say, “Tonight we will be talking about faith versus science. Our first guest is a former University of Oxford professor, evolutionary biologist, and bestselling author. He believes that science, not faith, holds the answers to all questions. On the other side of the aisle we have Joe Smith, who will speak for the legitimacy of faith and Christianity. Joe homeschools his kids, thinks Oprah is the Antichrist,

How often have we turned on the television and heard the host say, “Tonight we will be talking about faith versus science. Our first guest is a former University of Oxford professor, evolutionary biologist, and bestselling author. He believes that science, not faith, holds the answers to all questions. On the other side of the aisle we have Joe Smith, who will speak for the legitimacy of faith and Christianity. Joe homeschools his kids, thinks Oprah is the Antichrist, and lives in a swamp.

Good looks, for example, are denoted by symmetrical features—a sign that early life development was not disrupted by infection—and skin that shows no trace of pockmarks, sores, or other blemishes. With that in mind, you’d expect beauty to be more valued by those more susceptible to germs—a theory that evolutionary biologists put to the test in a survey of over seventy-one hundred people on six continents. In keeping with their prediction, those who lived in countries where parasites were leading causes of death and disability—in Nigeria and Brazil, for example—deemed good looks much more important in a mate than did inhabitants of nations like Finland and the Netherlands, which have among the lowest incidences of infection. In a British study, merely prompting people to think of germs—by, for example, showing them photos of a festering skin sore or a white cloth with a dark stain resembling a fecal smear—boosted how much they preferred symmetrical faces in the opposite sex.

The recently ill display similar biases, possibly, Schaller theorizes, because their immune systems may still be run-down, so their minds compensate by ratcheting up behavioral defenses. In support of that contention, he points to a provocative study by evolutionary biologist Daniel Fessler and colleagues, who showed that pregnant women become more xenophobic in the first trimester, when their immune systems are suppressed to prevent rejection of the fetus, but not in later stages of gestation, when that danger has passed.

If you attend a meeting of evolutionary biologists somewhere in America, you might be lucky and spot a tall, gray-whiskered, smiling man bearing a striking resemblance to Abraham Lincoln, standing rather diffidently at the back of the crowd. He will probably be surrounded by a knot of admirers, hanging on his every word—for he is a man of few words. A whisper will go around the room: “George is here.” You will sense from people’s reactions the presence of greatness.

Today’s self-multiplying debt overhead absorbs profits, rents, personal income and tax revenue in a process whose mathematics is much like that of environmental pollution. Evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson demonstrates how impossible it is for growth to proceed at exponential rates without encountering a limit. He cites “the arithmetical riddle of the lily pond. A lily pod is placed in a pond. Each day thereafter the pod and then all its descendants double

biologists would call the proximate causes of human variation-that is, we have been talking about its immediate causes rather than its long-run evolutionary causes. If

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, for example, might be a bit less certain in his gloomy assessment of human nature: “Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.”10 Maybe, but cooperation runs deep in our species too. Recent findings in comparative primate intelligence have led researchers Vanessa Woods and Brian Hare to wonder whether an impulse toward cooperation might actually be the key to our species-defining intelligence. They write, “Instead of getting a jump start with the most intelligent hominids surviving to produce the next generation, as is often suggested, it may have been the more sociable hominids—because they were better at solving problems together—who achieved a higher level of fitness and allowed selection to favor more sophisticated problem-solving over time.”11 Humans got smart, they hypothesize, because our ancestors learned to cooperate. Innately selfish or not, the effects of food provisioning and habitat depletion on both wild chimpanzees and human foragers suggest that Dawkins and others who argue that humans are innately aggressive, selfish beasts should be careful about citing these chimp data in support of their case. Human groups tend to respond to food surplus and storage with behavior like that observed in chimps: heightened hierarchical social organization, intergroup violence, territorial perimeter defense, and Machiavellian alliances. In other words, humans—like chimps—tend to fight when there’s something worth fighting over. But for most of prehistory, there was no food surplus to win or lose and no home base to defend.

While our species continues to manufacture its radically different and untested all-human world, the rest of life should be allowed to endure, for our own safety. While preserving our own deep history, it will, if we choose to let it, continue on its own trajectory through evolutionary time. By thus maintaining two parallel worlds on the planet, humanity will ensure the survival and continued advanced of the rest of life, and of ourselves.

the end of the hunter-gatherer way of life. Ever since this transition, which began about six hundred generations ago, the human species’ punishment has been to toil miserably as farmers, growing our daily bread rather than plucking luscious fruits just there for the taking. In a rare instance of accord, creationists and evolutionary biologists agree that it has been downhill for humans ever since. According to Jared Diamond, farming was the “worst mistake in the history of the human race.”1 In spite of having more food, hence more children, than hunter-gatherers, farmers generally have to work harder; they eat a lower-quality diet; they more often confront starvation because their crops occasionally fail from floods, droughts, and other disasters; and they live at higher population densities, which promote infectious diseases and social stress. Farming may have led to civilization and other types of “progress,” but it also led to misery and death on a grand scale. Most of the mismatch diseases from which we currently suffer stem from the transition from hunting and gathering to farming.

...quantum problems unseat many classical ideas about matter, causality, and change that biologists use, and that disruption in turn entails radical revisions to the ideas about the mechanism in evolution, in ways we don't yet acknowledge.

incidental by-products of alterations in other traits? Belyaev strongly leaned toward the latter view, because of a phenomenon known as “pleiotropy”: a single gene affecting multiple traits. Pleiotropy means that selection—whether natural or artificial—for one trait can affect many others. This is why evolutionary biologists make a distinction between selection for and selection of.9

Evolution & Electronics (The Sonnet) I know electronic circuitry like the back of my hand, Yet it's the human mind that fascinates me most immensely. Fascination in electronics lies in new design possibility, Whereas the mind is the breeding ground of all possibility. Our engineering is puny compared to that of Mother Nature, Each day a new mystery unfolds in the vast organic kingdom. Our puny electronics work based on cold 'n rigid computation, Evolution of life in nature is predicated on plastic mutation. That's why we must never disregard nature blinded by arrogance, We may have conquered nature's mercy but we're still subordinate. The moment a lifeform starts to vilify the womb whence it came, With a single blow creator nature can flatten all our obstinance. Foster humility and wisdom, before going nuts about technology. Don't end up yet another fancy stain upon the honor of humanity.

Evolutionary biologists have a word for this kind of borrowing, first proposed in an influential 1971 essay by Stephen Jay Gould and Elisabeth Vrba: exaptation. An organism develops a trait optimized for a specific use, but then the trait gets hijacked for a completely different function.

Daedalus Winter 2002. Vol. 131, pg. 89 The Biology of Race and the Concept of Equality. Ernst Mayr There is a widespread feeling that the word "race" indicates something undesirable and that it should be left out of all discussions. This leads to such statements as "there are no human races." Those who subscribe to this opinion are obviously ignorant of modern biology. Races are not something specifically human; races occur in a large percentage of species of animals. You can read in every textbook on evolution that geographic races of animals, when isolated from other races of their species, may in due time become new species. The terms "subspecies" and "geographic race" are used interchangeably in this taxonomic literature. … In a recent textbook of taxonomy, I defined a "geographic race" or subspecies as "an aggregate of phenotypically similar populations of a species inhabiting a geographic subdivision of the range of that species and differing taxonomically from other populations of that species." A subspecies is a geographic race that is sufficiently different taxonomically to be worthy of a separate name. What is characteristic of a geographic race is, first, that it is restricted to a geographic subdivision of the range of a species, and second, that in spite of certain diagnostic differences, it is part of a larger species. No matter what the cause of the racial difference might be, the fact that species of organisms may have geographic races has been demonstrated so frequently that it can no longer be denied. And the geographic races of the human races established before the voyages of European discovery and subsequent rise of a global economy - agree in most characteristics with the geographic races of animals. Recognizing races is only recognizing a biological fact. from Wikipedia: Ernst Mayr Ernst Walter Mayr was one of the 20th century's leading evolutionary biologists. He was also a renowned taxonomist, tropical explorer, ornithologist, philosopher of biology, and historian of science. His work contributed to the conceptual revolution that led to the modern evolutionary synthesis of Mendelian genetics, systematics, and Darwinian evolution, and to the development of the biological species concept.

Recognition of the existence of a sex drive in female birds set the stage for Darwinian feminism, as the American biologist Patricia Gowaty dubbed it in 1997. This label may sound like an oxymoron because many feminists consider humans to be far removed from the birds and the bees. They don’t see evolutionary science and its emphasis on genetics as particularly friendly to their cause. But for biological scientists, including the feminists among us, feminism can’t escape a connection with biology. After all, there wouldn’t be any need for feminism if we didn’t have two sexes to begin with. And why do we have two sexes? Because sexual reproduction works better than its alternative, which is cloning.

Many people know of the maxim said by the biologist François Jacob describing natural selection as a tinkerer. I like to think of the words of the US president Teddy Roosevelt: “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.