Goodness and Morality in Biology
The issue of good and evil in the human makeup, often associated with morality, is regarded by some biologists (notably Edward O. Wilson, Jeremy Griffith, David Sloan Wilson and Frans de Waal) as an important question to be addressed by the field of biology.
Read more about this topic: Good And Evil
Famous quotes containing the words goodness and, goodness, morality and/or biology:
“O! I must tell you that I have fallen in love with a gentleman whom I have lately come acquainted with: he is about 60 or 70—has the misfortune to be humpbacked, crooked legged, and rather deformed in his face.—But, in sober sadness, I am delighted with the Dean of Coleraine, whose picture this is, and which I have very lately read. The piety, the zeal, the humanity, goodness and humility of this charming old man have won my heart. Ah! who will not envy him the invaluable treasure!”
—Frances Burney (1752–1840)
“We over-estimate the conscience of our friend. His goodness seems better than our goodness, his nature finer, his temptations less. Everything that is his,—his name, his form, his dress, books, and instruments,—fancy enhances. Our own thought sounds new and larger from his mouth.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The hypothesis I wish to advance is that ... the language of morality is in ... grave disorder.... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.”
—Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (b. 1929)
“The “control of nature” is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and the convenience of man.”
—Rachel Carson (1907–1964)