Relevant Quotations

"We are survival machines — robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes." - Richard Dawkins - The Selfish Gene

"I am not apologizing for using the language of robotics. I would use it again without hesitation." - Richard Dawkins - The Extended Phenotype

"The ultimate goal that the mind was designed to attain is maximizing the number of copies of the genes that created it." - Steven Pinker - How The Mind Works

"Talk is cheap. Show me the code." - Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux operating system

"Those who study species from an adaptationist perspective adopt the stance of an engineer. In discussing sonar in bats, e.g., Dawkins proceeds as follows: "...I shall begin by posing a problem that the living machine faces, then I shall consider possible solutions to the problem that a sensible engineer might consider; I shall finally come to the solution that nature has actually adopted" (1986, pp. 21-22). Engineers figure out what problems they want to solve, and then design machines that are capable of solving these problems in an efficient manner. Evolutionary biologists figure out what adaptive problems a given species encountered during its evolutionary history, and then ask themselves, "What would a machine capable of solving these problems well under ancestral conditions look like?" Against this background, they empirically explore the design features of the evolved machines that, taken together, comprise an organism. Definitions of adaptive problems do not, of course, uniquely specify the design of the mechanisms that solve them. Because there are often multiple ways of achieving any solution, empirical studies are needed to decide "which nature has actually adopted". But the more precisely one can define an adaptive information-processing problem -- the "goal" of processing -- the more clearly one can see what a mechanism capable of producing that solution would have to look like. This research strategy has dominated the study of vision, for example, so that it is now commonplace to think of the visual system as a collection of functionally integrated computational devices, each specialized for solving a different problem in scene analysis -- judging depth, detecting motion, analyzing shape from shading, and so on." - Leda Cosmides & John Tooby - Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer

"In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history." - Charles Darwin - On the Origin of Species

"The human mind consists of a set of evolved information-processing mechanisms … produced by natural selection over evolutionary time." John Tooby and Leda Cosmides in The Adapted Mind

"Information and computation reside in patterns of data and in relations of logic that are independent of the physical medium that carries them." Steven Pinker - How The Mind Works

"The brain’s special status comes from a special thing the brain does, which makes us see, think, feel, choose, and act. That special thing is information processing, or computation." Steven Pinker - How The Mind Works

"I have a friend who's an artist, and he sometimes takes a view which I don't agree with. He'll hold up a flower and say, "Look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree. But then he'll say, "I, as an artist, can see how beautiful a flower is. But you, as a scientist, take it all apart and it becomes dull." I think he's kind of nutty. ... There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts." - Richard Feynman

"You are a computer, built by selection, and melted or disordered by entropy." John Tooby