David Stove > Quotes

“We set ourselves to achieve a society which would be maximally-tolerant. But that resolve not only gives maximum scope to the activities of those who have set themselves to achieve the maximally-intolerant society. It also, and more importantly, paralyzes our powers of resistance to them.”
― David Stove, Against the Idols of the Age

“Darwinians, then, have never paid, or even acknowledged, the
debt they have all along owed the public: a reconciliation of their teleological explanations of particular adaptations with their non-teleological explanation of adaptation in general. And not only have they never paid this debt: they have in fact become progressively less conscious, with time, of the fact that they owe this debt. This”
― David C. Stove, Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity and Other Fables of Evolution

“Defects of empirical knowledge have less to do with the ways we go wrong in philosophy than defects of character do: such things as the simple inability to shut up; determination to be thought deep; hunger for power; fear, especially the fear of an indifferent universe”
― David Stove, The Plato Cult: and Other Philosophical Follies

“sociobiologists are not merely willing, but devoted, "Slaves of the Gene."" They believe that an organism-a man, say-is epiphenomenal to his genes: an effect, not a cause. Or at least, they believe that a man is about as epiphenomenal to his genes, as his singlet (for example) is to him. Wilson spoke for all sociobiologists, when he said: "An organism is only DNA's way of making more DNA."24
Fourth:”
― David C. Stove, Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity and Other Fables of Evolution

“If "final causes" means purposes, or purposive activities, then Darwinism not only does not "expel" them: it builds them into the very foundation of its explanation of evolution.
Even”
― David C. Stove, Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity and Other Fables of Evolution

“New religionists, such as Williams, Dawkins, and Wilson, regard people and all other organisms as the helpless puppets, tools, or vehicles, of hidden purposive agents of more than human power and intelligence, whose only goal is to produce the largest possible number of their replicas in the next generation of organisms. But”
― David C. Stove, Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity and Other Fables of Evolution

“There are other beliefs which, though disproved countless times, never die out, because they appeal, not to something in everyone, but to a certain perennial type of person. An example is, the belief that everyone is at bottom selfish, or that no one ever acts intentionally except from motives of self-interest.

There is a perennial human type to whom this belief is peculiarly and irresistibly congenial. It is almost never a woman. It is a kind of man who is deficient in generous or even disinterested impulses himself, and knows it, but keeps up his self-esteem by thinking that everyone else is really in the same case. He prides himself, both on having the perspicacity to realise, what most people disguise even from themselves, that everyone is selfish, and on having the uncommon candour not to conceal this unpleasant home truth. Who has not met people of this type? In the Australian-English of 50 years ago, there was a wonderful expression for this kind of man: he was said to be 'as flash as a rat with a gold tooth”
― David Stove, Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity and Other Fables of Evolution

“It has turned out, in fact, to be far harder to translate teleological into non-teleological language than had been anticipated by philosophers; or at any rate, by philosophers friendly towards Darwinism (as virtually all the writers in question are). Whether such translation is possible at all is more than anyone knows.
As”
― David C. Stove, Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity and Other Fables of Evolution

“Nor have any Darwinians ever given, to this day, any such reconciliation of their theory with the teleological language which they employ as freely as though they were disciples, not of Darwin, but of Paley. Presumably”
― David C. Stove, Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity and Other Fables of Evolution

“In fact this ultimate degree of Darwinian faith, which blinds the faithful to even the most obvious facts of human life, is far commoner at present than it ever was before. But”
― David C. Stove, Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity and Other Fables of Evolution

“ALTRUISM WAS, from the very start, a problem for the Darwinian theory of evolution, if not something worse than a problem. As a result, Darwinians have always been under a certain temptation to "cut the knot," and deny the very existence of altruism. This”
― David C. Stove, Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity and Other Fables of Evolution

“Now, why is it that the idea of intention keeps turning up in explanations of adaptation, intruding even into ones where it is supposed to have no place? And why is it as hard, as we saw in the preceding section that it is, to translate the idea of intention out of the explanation of any particular adaptation?
"Surely”
― David C. Stove, Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity and Other Fables of Evolution

“Sociobiology, then, is a religion: one which has genes as its gods.
Yet”
― David C. Stove, Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity and Other Fables of Evolution

“Namely, that for every once that Dawkins says that genes are not purposive, he says a hundred things (many of which I have quoted) which imply that genes are purposive. And”
― David C. Stove, Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity and Other Fables of Evolution

“Sociobiology is not incomprehensible, but it is one of the religions which are obviously false. The”
― David C. Stove, Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity and Other Fables of Evolution

“But there is one fact which does emerge from human history with unvarying insistence, and it is a fact which is fatal to the Malthus-Darwin theory: that the natural rate of human increase is repressed the more, not where the misery due to famine, war, and pestilence falls more heavily, but precisely where it falls more lightly.”
― David Stove, Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity and Other Fables of Evolution

“Darwinians have always owed their readers a translation manual that would "cash" the teleological language which Darwinians avail themselves of without restraint in explaining particular adaptations, into the non-teleological language which their own theory of adaptation requires. But they have never paid, or even tried to pay, this debt.”
― David C. Stove, Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity and Other Fables of Evolution