People often support moral projects not because they hold any intrinsic attraction but because of their downstream effects on rivals – for example, reducing the their status or weakening their social power.

Individual organisms are best thought of as adaptation-executers rather than as fitness-maximizers.

Entropy makes things fall, but life ingeniously rigs the game so that when they do they often fall into place.

The assertion that "culture" explains human variation will be taken seriously when there are reports of women war parties raiding villages to capture men as husbands, or of parents cloistering their sons but not their daughters to protect their sons' virtue, or when cultural distributions for preferences concerning physical attractiveness, earning power, relative age, and so on show as many cultures with bias in one direction as in the other.