George C. Williams

Job's avoidance of rebellion against God has nothing to do with God being good or wise or anything like that; it's strictly because God is so powerful, and you don't fight something when you are so much weaker than that which you would fight.

The general rule is that anything that is passed on in reproduction does not undergo senescence.

Many traditional religions foster attitudes that ought to have disappeared as biological understanding accumulated over the last century.

Most evolving lineages, human or otherwise, when threatened with extinction, don't do anything special to avoid it.

The moment-of-conception fallacy implies that fertilization is a simple process with never a doubt as to whether it has or has not happened.

Ever since then, all descendant vertebrates have had the forward end of the digestive system and the forward end of the respiratory system very much involved with each other. This manifests itself in the human body with a crossing of the two systems in the throat.

The only realistic view is that a human life arises gradually, which is not much help in making personal decisions or devising public policy.

I think that my main criticism in that book was directed at the general assumption that adaptation characterizes populations and species, rather than simply the individuals in the populations and species.