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Quote by Daniel Dennett

“Let me lay my cards on the table. If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone ever had, I'd give it to Darwin, ahead of even Newton or Einstein and everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law. It is not just a wonderful idea. It is a dangerous idea.”

Quote by Daniel Dennett

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Daniel Dennett, born on March 28, 1942, is an American philosopher renowned for his work in cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and philosophy of the mind. His research spans various areas including consciousness, free will, and the philosophy of the mind. more

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“Darwin was one of our finest specimens. He did superbly what human beings are designed to do: manipulate social information to personal advantage. The information in question was the prevailing account of how human beings, and all organisms, came to exist; Darwin reshaped it in a way that radically raised his social status. When he died in 1882, his greatness was acclaimed in newspapers around the world, and he was buried in Westminster Abbey, not far from the body of Isaac Newton. Alpha-male territory.”

Source: The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology

“Along with William Shakespeare and Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin is Britain's greatest gift to the world. He was our greatest thinker.”

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Author:Richard Dawkins

“Today Charles Darwin is best known for establishing the fact of evolution and for recognizing the major role of natural selection in driving it.”

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Author:Jared Diamond

“Seen in retrospect, evolution as a whole doubtless had a general direction, from simple to complex, from dependence on to relative independence of the environment, to greater and greater autonomy of individuals, greater and greater development of sense organs and nervous systems conveying and processing information about the state of the organism's surroundings, and finally greater and greater consciousness. You can call this direction progress or by some other name.”

“Never say, and never take seriously anyone who says, 'I cannot believe that so-and-so could have evolved by gradual selection.' I have dubbed this kind of fallacy 'the Argument from Personal Incredulity.' Time and again, it has proven the prelude to an intellectual banana-skin experience.”

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Author:Richard Dawkins

“Our minds have been built by selfish genes, but they have been built to be social, trustworthy and cooperative.”

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Author:Matt Ridley

“Think of it : zillions and zillions of organisms running around, each under the hypnotic spell of a single truth, all these truths identical, and all logically incompatible with one another : 'My hereditary material is the most important material on earth; its survival justifies your frustration, pain, even death'. And you are one of those organisms, living your life in the thrall of a logical absurdity.”

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Book:The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology

Source: The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology

“The interaction of genetic and external influences makes my behaviour unpredictable, but not undetermined. In the gap between those words lies freedom.”

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Author:Matt Ridley

“Society works not because we have consciously invented it, but because it is an ancient product of our evolved predispositions. It is literally in our nature.”

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Book:The Origins of Virtue

Source: The Origins of Virtue

“The great paradox of determinism and free will, which has held the attention of the wisest of philosophers and psychologists for generations, can be phrased in more biological terms as follows: If our genes are inherited, and our environment is a train of physical events set in motion before we were born, how can there be a truly independent agent within the brain? The agent itself is created by the interaction of the genes and the environment. It would appear that our freedom is only a self delusion.”