Sublime

“In some respects,” Gruber concluded, “Charles Darwin’s greatest works represent interpretative compilations of facts first gathered by others.” He was a lateral-thinking integrator.

whether animals solve their ecological problems on their own by individual trial-and-error learning (and social groups form only because animals converge on rich food patches) or do so socially and live in groups in order to make this possible.

Bracketing satisficing with Darwinian may appear contradictory, for evolutionists sometimes talk about survival of the fittest. But in fact, natural selection only predicts that survivors will be fit enough, that is, fitter than their losing competitors; it postulates satisficing, not optimizing.

Males without “certainty of paternity” are unlikely to stick around to pair-bond with a female and help raise the kids. Male birds tend to have high certainty of paternity, but male mammals are rarely certain at all. As a result, male mammals tend to abandon mates and offspring when—if they could just be confident of their paternity—selection would

ils constatèrent que presque chacun d’entre eux avait suivi ce qui ressemblait à un parcours inhabituel. « Ce qui était encore plus incroyable, c’était qu’ils pensaient tous être l’anomalie », m’expliqua Ogas. Quarante-cinq des cinquante premiers sujets décrivaient des trajectoires professionnelles tellement sinueuses qu’ils semblaient presque gêné

Epigenetic regulators, such as culture, evolve to serve the genome.

En politique, une grande part de ce que les gens croient – d’un point de vue idéologique, disons – est fondée sur leur tempérament inné. Si leurs émotions et leurs motivations ont tendance à pencher d’un côté (c’est en partie une conséquence biologique), alors ils adopteront des idées plus conservatrices ou plus libérales. Ce n’est pas une question

Prior to the modern Western paradigm, other world views (such as the African Ubuntu philosophy – ‘I am because we are’) focused on the co-operative, cohesive side of man, which nineteenth-century Russian evolutionist Peter Kropotkin and more recently genome expert Matt Ridley confirmed is just as deep-rooted a part of human nature as individualisti