“... of biological altruism, they see group selection as what is really going on. In the Seventies, Richard Dawkins took a similarly hard line when claiming that natural selection is really a process in which ‘selfish genes’ struggle against one another. Later, he changed to a more relaxed view, suggesting that such processes could be fully represented ...”

“... with charm) is particularly striking. Johnston ticks off ‘undergraduate atheists’ like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, who have doubtless noticed this correlation, and scolds them for their errors about Spinoza, but I find Dawkins and Hitchens (and Sam Harris) companionable, as I find Johnston ...”

“... wide philosophical interest. In clarifying the distinction between the selfish gene hypothesis of Richard Dawkins and the selfish DNA hypothesis of Francis Crick, he is led into an enlightening discussion of biological reductionism. The Darwinism of Dawkins is thoroughly reductionist, in the sense that bodies are ...”

“... at any level from the molecular to the cellular to the entire organism and its behaviour. Richard Dawkins extended its definition by asserting that the dam a beaver builds is part of its phenotype.) Epigenetics seeks to explain how, starting from an identical set of genes, the contingencies of development can lead to different outcomes. To ...”

“... This is an arresting, and frequently a very funny book. At times almost surreally virtuoso – Richard Dawkins on ice – it works a highly intelligent set of variations on the domestic and evolutionary question ‘Whey you from?’ Imlah’s first collection, with its startling answers, reinforces in yet another idiom the urgency of that ...”

“... dreadful, to be the logic of all this, and recent television performances by Nick Humphreys and Richard Dawkins confirm this. Aren’t we all tired of these reiterations of sauve qui peut or, at its worst, that we don’t have it in us to love other people’s children? I’m sure there is a vast constituency of exhaustion out there, which feels it has ...”

“... unique educational value. Evensong has become more of a cultural icon than a religious event. As Richard Dawkins, no theist, put it, ‘I’m a cultural Anglican and I see evensong in a country church through much the same eyes as I see a village cricket match on the village green.’But Stanford hadn’t set out to be only a church music composer. He ...”

“... the infallible cure for athlete’s foot: all reproduce when passed from one person to another. Richard Dawkins has called such reproducing ideas ‘memes’. Runciman’s insight has been to see that Darwinian ‘things’ can also be whatever occurs when an individual finds him or herself to be a member of a group. What then occurs are ‘social ...”

“... evolutionary pressure. It was grouped together with books by Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins to form the canon of ‘new atheism’. I’ve Been Thinking opens with an account of the open-heart surgery Dennett underwent following a near fatal heart attack. To reduce the risk of mini-strokes, his surgeons reversed the flow of blood to ...”

“... hauls himself up over the final overhang – and collapses into a company of picnickers. Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris motored up to his chosen summit a while ago; and here, sure enough, stepping forward to pat the newcomer on the back and welcome him along, who should it be but Philip ...”

“... between the experience of seeing something and earlier English poetry. It has a tincture of Richard Crashaw’s Counter-Reformation gory godliness; a flavour of Gerard Manley Hopkins in the way it risks going too far with the alliterating ‘bleb’ and ‘blood’; and the echt Hill quality of making it appear that just seeing something can hurt. The ...”

“... and quickly took root in the public imagination. But it also set some eyes rolling. Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould were critical, and scientists across the board argued that Gaia smacked of teleology or even new-age mysticism. Can we really say a planet is an organism? What if life just evolves and there’s nothing that actually ...”

“... head, which is empirically false. On the other hand, it only re-creates the same difficulty when Richard Dawkins goes to the other extreme and, having dismissed Wynne-Edwards more or less out of hand in favour of genes as the units of natural selection, identifies the unit of social selection as any item of cultural transmission capable of ...”

“... it can’t. Hence the current perplexity. History might reasonably credit Stephen J. Gould and Richard Lewontin as the first to notice that something may be seriously wrong in this part of the wood. Their 1979 paper, ‘The Spandrels of S. Marco and The Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme’, ignited an argument about the ...”

“... Brian picks a brilliant selection of Desert Island Discs, Eno nominates for his beach read Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony and Solidarity; Brian is all weird eros, Eno makes music that can be oddly clenched or wafty; Brian is inspiringly playful, Eno writes software to systematise (and cage, and kill) that playfulness.Now aged 77, the two of them ...”