Willard Van Orman Quine Quotes

If you watch animals objectively for any length of time, you're driven to the conclusion that their main aim in life is to pass on their genes to the next generation.

I'm here as a product of process of evolution, which doesn't make very many exceptions. And which rates life relatively cheaply.

Darwin himself recorded the fact that he accepted the Malthusian idea.

We're basically this very young species, only 200,000 years old. We're one of the newcomers, and we're going through the same process that other species go through, which is, how do I keep myself alive while taking care of the place that's going to keep my offspring alive?

Every animal would rather die themselves than lose their offspring. But it's just genes, isn't it? All of our existence is spent worrying about the next generation, but we don't actually seem to get anywhere.

Most of them are doomed to rapid extinction, but a few may make evolutionary inventions, such as physiological, ecological, or behavioral innovations that give these species improved competitive potential.

Wherever there is a design that is highly successful in a broad range of similar environments, it is apt to emerge again and again, independently - the phenomenon known in biology as convergent evolution. I call these designs 'good tricks.'

One of the great issues in biology is the origin of altruism - of why you would do something for someone else that could hurt you - and Darwin posited that it might be rooted in maternal instinct, in sacrificing yourself for your children.

We know from biology that new forms of organisms simulate their primitive form as closely as possible at first, even though obliged to exist under changed internal and external conditions.

In courtship, who wins and who loses will determine who passes on their DNA to tomorrow.

Animals have genes for altruism, and those genes have been selected in the evolution of many creatures because of the advantage they confer for the continuing survival of the species.

Action leads to Attention. that in the short-term releases Rewarding brain chemicals and in the long term improves reproductive success.

Evolution is all about passing on the genome to the next generation, adapting and surviving through generation after generation. From an evolutionary point of view, you and I are like the booster rockets designed to send the genetic payload into the next level of orbit and then drop off into the sea.

When a trait is universal, evolutionary biologists look for a genetic explanation and wonder how that gene or genes might enhance survival or reproductive success.

Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous.

Our retinas and brains have been wired by a hundred million years of evolution to find outlines in a visually complex landscape. This helps us to recognize prey and predators.

Above all, TRIBES is fun, and even kind of sexy... in that every round features an Opportunity for Reproduction, which is the main aim of the game, as it is in most of Nature.

It is difficult to imagine evolution in alien planets operating in any manner other than Darwinian.

Natural Selection never made it come to pass, as a habit of nature, that an unsupported stone should move downwards rather than upwards. It applies to no part of inorganic nature, and is very limited even in the phenomena of organic life.

Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature's inexorable imperative.

My theory of evolution is that Darwin was adopted.

I'm a Darwinian.

Unlike your fish tank, in nature, fish eat each other. When the population of a species gets too low, it will die out.

Our physiological constitution is obviously a product of Darwinian processes, insofar as you buy the evolutional theory as a generative, as an account of the mechanism that generated us. Our physiology evolved, our behaviors evolved, and our accounts of those behaviors, both successful and unsuccessful, evolved.

I have always had this basic biological question in terms of evolution, if the drive to evolution is to like survive. An organism that survives well, there is really no need for consciousness in there.