Sublime

Nature’s way of testing any self-replicating device is competition. For over three and a half billion years,354 she has set the products of the genetic system in a race to see who can corner the good things of this life.

Homo heidelbergensis is therefore our best candidate for Rubicon crosser.64 These people had cumulative culture, teamwork, and a division of labor. They must have had shared intentionality, including at least some rudimentary moral matrix that helped them work together and then share the fruits of their labor.

But the shape of the bear’s genes contributes both to their own copying and to the shape of the bear’s nose and of its offspring’s nose.

ils avaient montré que les variétés se reproduisant par voie sexuelle évoluaient moins vite que celles qui se reproduisaient par clonage ; les mutations aléatoires, donc, apparaissaient dans ce cas plus efficaces que la sélection naturelle. Le montage expérimental était amusant, et contredisait avec clarté l'hypothèse classique de la reproduction s

Darwinian evolution has great difficulty accounting for the existence of objective moral obligations.

Love as we experience it first evolved nearly two hundred million years ago, when mammals diverged from reptiles.

Colorado Adoption Project,

When we do, we assume the politicians are clients in a patron–client relationship, and we assume their obligations will cloud their impartial judgment.

although it is self-evidently true, it is not self-evidently the explanation of specific adaptations. Our intuition prefers explanations in terms of function or purpose: what does a gene do for its holder, or for its species? But we have just seen that the genes generally do not optimize such functionality.