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

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• “This meaning-argument is of a very different kind from the arguments I have been speaking about so far. The premise entails the conclusion all right, but it is so astoundingly false that it defies criticism, at first, by the simple method of taking the reader's breath away. This was a method which the neo-Hegelian idealists later perfected: reasoning from a sudden and violent solecism. Say or imply, for example, that in English “value” means the same as “individuality.” You can be miles down the track of your argument before they get their breath back.
  This method is not only physiologically but ethologically sound. Of course it should never be used first. You need first to earn the respect of your readers, by some good reasoning, penetrating observations, or the like: then apply the violent solecism. Tell them, for example, that when we say of something that it is a prime number, we mean that it was born out of wedlock. You cannot go wrong this way. Decent philosophers will be so disconcerted by this, that they will never do the one thing they should do: simply say, “That is NOT what ‘prime number’ means!” Instead, they will always begin … [by] casting about for an excuse for someone’s saying what you said, or a half-excuse, or a one-eighth excuse; nor is there any danger that they will search in vain.”

  David Stove

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• “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 Stove

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• “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

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• “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 Stove

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• “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 Stove

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• “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 Stove

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• “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 Stove

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• “Sociobiology, then, is a religion: one which has genes as its gods.
  Yet”

  David Stove

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• “Sociobiology is not incomprehensible, but it is one of the religions which are obviously false. The”

  David Stove

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• “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 Stove

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• “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 Stove

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• “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 Stove

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• “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 Stove

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• “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 Stove

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• “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 Stove

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