Very often in science one finds that there are ideas in the air, and lots of people hold them, but they don't even realise they hold them. The person who can crystallize them, and lay out not only the central idea but its implications for future scientific research can often make a tremendous contribution. And I think that's what 'The Selfish Gene' did. Lots of scientists, they'd been Darwinians all their lives, but they'd been inarticulate Darwinians. And now they really understood what was foundational to Darwinism and what was peripheral. And once you understand what is foundational, then you begin to deduce conclusions.

... a fairly common pattern in television news: right at the end a smile comes onto the face of the newsreader and this is the scientific joke - 'some scientis…

I really want to say that there are no major disagreements ... I think the tendency of American intellectuals to learn their evolution from him [Gould] is unfo…

What are all of us but self-reproducing robots? ... We have been put together by our genes and what we do is roam the world looking for a way to sustain oursel…

It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are now present, which could ever have been present. But if (and oh! wha…

And there hasn't been much progress in Darwinism since [the life of Darwin].

Wallace's error on human intellect arose from the inadequacy of his rigid selectionism, not from a failure to apply it. And his argument repays our study today…