Philosophers of biology generally recognize that…

The upshot is that most philosophers of biology now hold that biological properties supervene on physical properties (where supervenience is taken to include some…

— Elliott Sober

Nature is interested in only two things--to survive and to reproduce one like itself. Anything you superimpose on that, all the cultural input, is…

— U.G. Krishnamurti

Mammals are sentient beings that want to live and are afraid to die. Evolution vouchsafed us all with an instinct to survive, reproduce and…

— Michael Shermer

“Those natural designs that survive to reproduce pass on their genes. Those that don’t successfully reproduce disappear; their genes disappear as well.”

— Bill Nye

“For the rest of the earth’s organisms, existence is relatively uncomplicated. Their lives are about three things: survival, reproduction, death—and nothing else. But we…

— Thomas Ligotti

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…

— Elliott Sober

Evolutionary biologists often appeal to parsimony when they seek to explain why organisms "match" with respect to a given trait. For example, why do…

— Elliott Sober

Trait X is fitter than trait Y in a population of organisms if those organisms have other biological traits T and live in an…

— Elliott Sober

If the organisms in a species now have trait T, and this trait now helps those organisms to survive and reproduce because the trait…

— Elliott Sober

Group selection and individual selection are just two of the selection processes that have played important roles in evolution. There also is selection within…

— Elliott Sober

To prove that tuberculosis is caused by the invasion of bacilli, and that it is a parasitic disease primarily caused by the growth and…

— Robert Koch

The haunting of history is ever present in Barcelona. I see cities as organisms, as living creatures. To me, Madrid is a man and…

— Carlos Ruiz Zafon

My Calvinism persuades me that we are open to God, in the sense that we are not delimited, not organisms with fixed attributes in…

— Marilynne Robinson

Let us ask... how things work at the level of on-going subjugation, at the level of those continuous and uninterrupted processes which subject our…

— Michel Foucault

As human beings, we are the only organisms that create for the sheer stupid pleasure of doing so. Whether it's laying out a garden,…

— Gary Hamel