Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
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which a slight variation, if useful, is
preserved, by the term Natural Selection, in order to mark its relation
to man’s power of selection. But the expression often used
by Mr Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate,
and is sometimes equally convenient. Charles Darwin (1872) The Origin Of Species (Sixth edition) edited by R E Leakey. Hill and Wang, New York.
Darwin's contemporaries saw at once what a heavy blow he was striking against piety. His theory entailed the inference that we are here today not because God reciprocates our love, forgives our sins, and attends to our entreaties but because each of our oceanic and terrestrial foremothers was lucky enough to elude her predators long enough to reproduce.
F C Crews (2001) New York Review of Books
We all assume that the future will be like the past – it is the essential but unprovable premise of all our inductive inferences, as Hume noted. Mother Nature (the designer-developer realized in the processes of natural selection) makes the same assumption. In many regards, things stay the same: gravity continues to exert its force, water continues to evaporate, organisms continue to need to replenish and protect their body water, looming things continue to subtend ever-larger portions of the retina and so on. Where generalities like these are at issue, Mother Nature provides long-term solutions to problems: hard-wired, gravity based which-way-is-up detectors, hard-wired thirst alarms, hard-wired duck-when-something-looms circuits. Other things change, but predictably, in cycles, and Mother Nature responds to them with other hard-wired devices, such as winter-coat-growing mechanisms triggered by temperature shifts, and built-in alarm clocks to govern the waking and sleeping cycles of nocturnal and diurnal animals. But sometimes the opportunities and vicissitudes in the environment are relatively unpredictable by Mother Nature or anyone – they are, or are influenced by, processes that are chaotic. In these cases, no one stereotyped design will accommodate itself to all eventualities, so better organisms will be those that can redesign themselves to some degree to meet the conditions they encounter.
Daniel C. Dennett (1991) Consciousness Explained. Little, Brown and Co. New York
The brain is waking and with it the mind is returning. It is as if the Milky Way entered upon some cosmic dance. Swiftly the head-mass becomes an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern though never an abiding one; a shifting harmony of sub-patterns.
C S Sherrington (1940) M
an On His Nature. Penguin Books, London…Arthur of England was a champion of civilization which is misrepresented in the history books…..In those despised Middle Ages of theirs you could become the greatest man in the world, by simply having learning. And it is a mistake to believe that Arthur’s civilization was weak in this famous science of ours. The scientists, although they happened to call them magicians at the time, invented almost as terrible things as we have invented – except that we have become accustomed to theirs by use. The greatest magicians, like Albertus Magnus, Friar Bacon, and Raymond Lully, knew several secrets which we have lost today, and discovered as a side issue what still appears to be the chief commodity of civilization, namely gunpowder. They were honoured for their learning, and Albert the Great was made a bishop. One of them who was called Baptista Porta seems to have invented the cinema - although he sensibly decided not to develop it.
T H White (1958) The Once And Future King. Fontana/Collins. London
Our lives … are a constant dance between ….surges of ancient emotions and their impulsive behaviours on the one hand, and the slower cognitions and admonishments of the evolutionarily later cerebral cortex on the other.
Ian Robertson (1999) Mind Sculpture. Bantam Books, London