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.

The neo-Darwinian perspective, which still dominates the popular understanding of biology, isolates individual organisms or genes from the context of the living matrix that sustains them. Scarcity, competition and individual success are seen as the main drivers of evolution. This is an outdated perspective, based on outdated metaphors like Richard

Edward O. Wilson, “Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.”

God is Not Great complements rather than competes with The God Delusion. Where I, as a scientist, am most concerned with religious faith as a rival to science in the role of explainer, Christopher’s objections were more political and moral. He found repugnant the very idea of a celestial dictator who demands total obedience and devotion, and is pre

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

My 'Descent of Man' was published in February, 1871. As soon as I had become, in the year 1837 or 1838, convinced that species were mutable productions, I could not avoid the belief that man must come under the same law. Accordingly I collected notes on the subject for my own satisfaction, and not for a long time with any intention of publishing. A

there is no need to go outside the universe and identify a supernatural agent to account for our appearance in it, since there are good, entirely natural explanations available.