Ancestry – Quotes

No self is of

No self is of itself alone. It has a long chain of intellectual ancestors. The I is chained to ancestry by many factors … This is not mere allegory, but an eternal memory. Erwin Schrodinger

Laughter to begin with was probably glee at the misfortunes of others. The baring of the teeth in laughter hints at its savage ancestry. Animals have no malice, hence also no laughter. They never savor the sudden glory of Schadenfreude. It was its infectious quality that made of laughter a medium of mutuality. Eric Hoffer

Darwin and his successors

Darwin and his successors have railed against the fallacy of confusing the current utility of a trait with the reason the trait evolved. For example, Darwin argued that skull sutures in mammals did not evolve because they facilitate live birth; the sutures were in place well before live birth evolved. Checking the chronological order in … Read more

The big picture, I

The big picture, I think, is that common ancestry is evidentially prior to natural selection in Darwin’s theory and in contemporary evolutionary biology as well. Elliott Sober

Current organisms have a

Current organisms have a higher probability of sharing a single code if the common ancestry hypothesis is true than they’d have if the hypothesis of separate ancestry were true. That is, the simpler hypothesis has the higher likelihood in the technical sense of \”likelihood\” used in statistics. Elliott Sober

Darwin repeatedly used the

Darwin repeatedly used the hypothesis of common ancestry as a platform on which to build his various ideas about testing hypotheses concerning natural selection. He also argued that adaptive similarities provide little or no evidence for common ancestry. Although this second claim needs to be fine-tuned, Darwin was right that ample evidence for common ancestry … Read more

It\\’s just as hard

It’s just as hard for man to break the habit of thinking of himself as central to the species as it was to break the habit of thinking of himself as central to the universe. He sees himself quite unconsciously as the main line of evolution, with a female satellite revolving around him as the … Read more

I received a most

I received a most amusing postcard the other morning. Unfortunately, it was not signed in a readable manner so I cannot answer it privately. But it comes from Moblie, Ala., and says: ‘Dear Mrs. Roosevelt: You have not answered my question, the amount of Negro blood you have in your veins, if any.’ I am … Read more

The power of perpetuating

The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which tends the most to the perpetuation of society itself. Edmund Burke

Some decent regulated pre-eminence,

Some decent regulated pre-eminence, some preference (not exclusive appropriation) given to birth, is neither unnatural, nor unjust, nor impolite. Edmund Burke