Elliott Sober Quotes

Deism claims that God creates the universe and the laws of nature and then is hands-off, with everything that subsequently happens in nature being due to natural processes.

The big picture, I think, is that common ancestry is evidentially prior to natural selection in Darwin's theory and in contemporary evolutionary biology as well.

Earlier attempts to show that simpler theories always have higher prior probabilities have failed, but there is a restricted circumstance in which the claim is right.

Biologists now pretty universally regard vitalism as a vestige of a bygone age.

I think that the existence of Beethoven is remarkable, but I do not bristle at the suggestion that this event had a low probability given the initial state of the universe.

I don't endorse deism or interventionist theism. My point is just that evolutionary biology is logically compatible with the former and with some versions of the latter.

When one theory is simpler than its competitor, this fact is relevant to saying what the world is like.

Philosophers of biology generally recognize that evolutionary fitness (roughly, an organism's ability to survive and reproduce in its environment) is multiply realizable.

Just as thought experiments can't show that vitalism is true (or that it is false), they also can't show that dualism is true (or that it is false).

From the fact that E is evidence for T and the fact that T entails M, it doesn't follow that E is evidence for M.

Deism is logically compatible with evolutionary theory for the simple reason that the theory says nothing about the origin of the universe or of the laws of nature.

"Simpler is always better" is an overstatement.

Some philosophical arguments (e.g., in connection with the mind/body problem) look pretty good, while others (e.g., those that criticize moral realism) do not.

Creationists have long held that evolutionary theory is atheistic; defenders of the theory do the theory no favor when they agree.

Scientists often seek predictively accurate models, rather than models that are true.

I disagree with those who argue that evolutionary biology and the existence of God are incompatible.

Deism is compatible with evolutionary theory.

I disagree with the widely held view that it is metaphysical necessity, not nomological, that matters in the mind/body problem.

"Tiger is a natural kind" and "Tiger is a historical particular" are incompatible with each other, and evolutionary biology provides a reason for favoring the latter over the former.

In many contexts, simplicity is not an aesthetic frill.

Our own species evolved under the influence of group selection, as Darwin emphasized when he discussed the evolution of altruism.