Sublime

that people—or, if you like, automata, algorithms—can and do act in situations that are not well defined.

We’ve also learned that the body has evolved a vast array of “epigenetic” processes—meaning ones that affect the activation of genes and are influenced by our life experiences.

A closer look shows that the hierarchies are constructed on a “building block” principle: subsystems at each level of the hierarchy are constructed by combinations of small numbers of subsystems from the next lower level.

I use one more category, “Trajectory,” in which I scrutinize the year-to-year changes and their course across a decade.

Darwin believed that morality was an adaptation that evolved by natural selection operating at the individual level and at the group level.

Adaptive evolution improves the “fit” of creatures to their environment.

The value (“fitness”) of a given combination of building blocks often cannot be predicted by a summing up of values assigned to the component blocks. This nonlinearity (commonly called epistasis in genetics) leads to co-adapted sets of blocks (alleles) that serve to bias sampling and add additional layers to the hierarchy.

We have at least the mental equipment to foster our long-term selfish interests rather than merely our short-term selfish interests. We can see the long-term benefits of participating in

They appear to want some of the same things most of us want: recognition from their peers and communities and better lives for the people they care about. Being