Sublime

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

Natural selection isn’t about groups, or species, or even individuals. In a sexual species, an individual organism doesn’t evolve; it keeps whatever genes it’s born with. An individual is a once-off collection of genes that will never reappear; how can you select on that? When you consider that nearly all of your ancestors are dead, it’s clear that

Weinberg’s vision of a universe without purpose or meaning has become so much the scientific orthodoxy that it is almost obligatory for biologists to insist on it too. Words like purpose, meaning, even function, are treated with a caution bordering on disdain in the life sciences. At best they are corralled with scare quotes that proclaim them mere

To them, laws don’t merely summarize what happens, they govern what happens.

one of the best descriptions of science I’ve ever read: ‘Science is guided by natural law. It has to be explanatory by reference to natural law. It is testable against the empirical world. Its conclusions are tentative (not necessarily the final word). It is falsifiable.’

what is really interesting is the question of what drives life, what explains animal behavior and what explains the correspondence between organism and environment. This is the question. The mechanism of heredity or the means by which a species is shaped, natural or unnatural selection, which is really Darwin’s only insight, is the least

So let’s consider, as a tentative proposal, defining semantic information as design worth getting, and let’s leave the term “design” as noncommittal as possible for the time being, allowing only for the point I stressed in chapter 3, that design without a designer (in the sense of an intelligent designer) is a real and important category. Design