Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author
Darwin's Dangerous Disciple: An Interview by Frank Miele (1995)
“Selection does not work by cutthroat competition between individuals, but by favouring whatever behavior is useful to the group.”
Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979). 132.
Context: Selection does not work by cutthroat competition between individuals, but by favouring whatever behavior is useful to the group. People with crude notions of "Darwinism" make an intriguing blunder here. They refuse the mere fact of competing, that is, of needing to share out a resource with the motive of competitiveness or readiness to quarrel.
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Mary Midgley42
British philosopher and ethicist 1919–2018Related quotes
Nick Land (1962) British philosopher
"Kinds of Killing" https://web.archive.org/web/20121111032625/http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/article/1008/kinds-of-killing (2011) (original emphasis)
Premchand (1880–1936) Hindi writer
Spoke in a lecture quoted in page=96
Portrayal of Women in Premchands Stories A Critique
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist
Source: 1930s, Power: A New Social Analysis (1938), p. 165
Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) American historian
Source: The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (Second Edition 1979), Chapter 3, Groups, Societies, and Civilizations, p. 67
Konrad Lorenz book Civilized Man's Eight Deadly Sins
pp 45-47
Civilized Man's Eight Deadly Sins (1973)
Context: The competition between human beings destroys with cold and diabolic brutality.... Under the pressure of this competitive fury we have not only forgotten what is useful to humanity as a whole, but even that which is good and advantageous to the individual.... One asks, which is more damaging to modern humanity: the thirst for money or consuming haste... in either case, fear plays a very important role: the fear of being overtaken by one's competitors, the fear of becoming poor, the fear of making wrong decisions or the fear of not being up to snuff.
Nick Land (1962) British philosopher
"Kinds of Killing" https://web.archive.org/web/20121111032625/http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/article/1008/kinds-of-killing (2011) (original emphasis)
Reinhold Niebuhr book Moral Man and Immoral Society
Source: Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932), pp. 8-9
Context: The inevitable hypocrisy, which is associated with the all the collective activities of the human race, springs chiefly from this source: that individuals have a moral code which makes the actions of collective man an outrage to their conscience. They therefore invent romantic and moral interpretations of the real facts, preferring to obscure rather than reveal the true character of their collective behavior. Sometimes they are as anxious to offer moral justifications for the brutalities from which they suffer as for those which they commit. The fact that the hypocrisy of man's group behavior... expresses itself not only in terms of self-justification but in terms of moral justification of human behavior in general, symbolizes one of the tragedies of the human spirit: its inability to conform its collective life to its individual ideals. As individuals, men believe they ought to love and serve each other and establish justice between each other. As racial, economic and national groups they take for themselves, whatever their power can command.
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate
"The Origins and Effects of Our Morals: A Problem for Science", in The Essence of Hayek (1984)
1980s and later