Peter Singer, 'Darwin for the Left' in Writings on an Ethical Life, (2001) (originally published in Prospect, June 1998)

'First, a Darwinian left would not deny the existence of a human nature or insist that human nature is inherently good or infinitely malleable. Second, it would not expect to end all conflict and strife between human beings. Third, it would not assume that all inequalities are due to discrimination, prejudice, oppression, or social conditioning.'

Adam Phillips, Darwin's Worms, (1999)

'It is the paradoxical combination of undermining and conserving - as though, when it comes to worms, the conservation is in the undermining, although neither thing is the worm's intention - that fires Darwin's speculative imagination; and that is, indeed, a description of his own work, in its effect if not in its intention. Like Freud, Darwin is interested in how destruction conserves life; and in the kind of life destruction makes possible.'

Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, (1972)

"What is it in the territory that gets onto the map?"... What gets onto the map, in fact, is difference, be it a difference in altitude, a difference in vegetation, a difference in population structure, difference in surface, or whatever. Differences are the things that get onto a map.'

Mary Midgely, Evolution as a Religion. Strange hopes and stranger fears, (1985)

'Evolution, then, is the creation myth of our age. By telling us our origins it shapes our views of what we are... To call it a myth does not of course mean that it is a false story. It means that it has great symbolic power, which is independent of its truth.'

Terry Eagleton, After Theory, 2003

'To be inside and outside a position at the same time - to occupy a territory while loitering sceptically on the boundary - is often where the most intensely creative ideas stem from.'

Terry Eagleton, After Theory, 2003

'Individuation is one of the activities proper to our species being. It is a practice, not a given condition? It is a project we have to accomplish. Our species life is such that it enables us to establish a unique relationship to the species known as personal identity. Matter is always a particular business... The word 'specific' itself means both peculiar and 'of the species'.'

Charles Darwin, On The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection, (1859)

'With respect to the belief that organic beings have been created beautiful for the delight of man, - a belief which has been pronounced subversive of my whole theory, - I may first remark that the sense of beauty obviously depends on the nature of the mind, irrespective of any real quality in the admired object; and that the idea of what is beautiful, is not innate or unalterable. We see this, for instance, in the men of different races admiring an entirely different standard of beauty in their women. If beautiful objects had been created solely for man's gratification, it ought to be shown that before man appeared, there was less beauty on the face of the earth than since he came of the stage. Were the beautiful volute and cone shells of the Eocene epoch, and the gracefully sculptured ammonites of the Secondary period, crated that man might ages afterwards admire them in his cabinet?'

Charles Darwin, On The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection, (1859)

'And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection. It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth and Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed laws of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.'

Claude Levi Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, (1955)

'Every effort to understand destroys the object studied in favour of another object of a different nature; this second subject requires from us a new effort which destroys it in favour of the third, and so on and so forth until we reach our lasting presence...the point from which we began.'

Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System, (1995)

'The evolutionary mechanisms of variety, selection, and restabilization differentiate themselves only at the level of the system. Only at this level do social conditions emerge that facilitate the production of artworks. If art is not sufficiently differentiated as a phenomenon, then there can be no freedom of beginning, no conception of what is involved in producing or encountering a work of art.'

Marcus Aurelius 'The Meditations' (167 CE)

'Constant awareness that everything is born from change. The knowledge that there is nothing nature loves more than to alter what exists and make new things like it. All that exists is the seed of what will emerge from it. You think the only seeds are the ones that make plants or children? Go deeper.'

Marcus Aurelius 'The Meditations' (167 CE)

'Grapes. Unripe...ripened...then raisins. Constant transitions. Not the "not" but the "not yet."'