Sublime

Just as there are physicists who will tell you that everything that happens can ultimately be explained by physics alone (it can’t), and chemists who tell you that in the end biology is just chemistry (it isn’t), so by asserting the primacy of the gene, geneticists are establishing an intellectual pecking order when they attribute more to genes tha

The key realization is that there is no Evolution Fairy. There’s no outside force deciding which genes ought to be promoted. Whatever happens, happens because of the genes themselves.

Evolution (the sinister enemy of revolution) does not especially deny the existence of God; what it does deny is the existence of man.

We could model agents who had disparate ideas or hypotheses about the situation they were in. They could base their actions on these, and learn which hypotheses worked and which didn’t, getting smarter over time.

We are always working in parallel to both discover the necessary product to be built—which is primarily what the product manager and designer work on every day—while the engineers work to deliver production‐quality product.

Very recently, certain animal brains have begun to exhibit both generality of optimization power (producing an amazingly wide range of artifacts, in time scales too short for natural selection to play any significant role) and cumulative optimization power (artifacts of increasing complexity, as a result of skills passed on through language and wri

psychologist and prominent creativity researcher Dean Keith Simonton observed, “rather than obsessively focus[ing] on a narrow topic,” creative achievers tend to have broad interests. “This breadth often supports insights that cannot be attributed to domain-specific expertise alone.”

Although much remains obscure, and will long remain obscure, I can entertain no doubt, after the most deliberate study and dispassionate judgment of which I am capable, that the view which most naturalists entertain, and which I formerly entertained—namely, that each species has been independently created—is erroneous.