“The point cannot be just survival, nor even survival in numbers. Survival is just as well achieved by much less ambitions creatures which go in for sheer number. (In fact a cost-benefit-conscious gene that really understood its business would, no doubt, have remained on board something like the amoeba; it will probably be amoung the last to go.) Nor is it survival-as-society, since many animals achieve this despite a lot of bickering.”

—  Mary Midgley

Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979). 148.

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Mary Midgley 42
British philosopher and ethicist 1919–2018

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