Mathematics without natural history is sterile, but natural history without mathematics is muddled.

Evolutionary game theory is a way of thinking about evolution at the phenotypic level when the fitnesses of particular phenotypes depend on their frequencies in the population.

I can't go around believing in a God that believes suffering is good for me.

It is an occupational risk of biologists to claim, towards the end of their careers, that the problems which they have not solved are insoluble.

Mathematics is so much easier than words mathematics makes things clear that words merely muddle and confuse and mess up.

It is in the nature of science that once a position becomes orthodox it should be suggested to criticism.... It does not follow that, because a position is orthodox, it is wrong.

This argument [that life is too improbable to have arisen by chance] comes up repeatedly: its latest manifestation is Hoyle's discussion of the likelihood of a wind blowing through a junkyard assembling a Boeing 707 [sic]. What is wrong with it? Essentially, it is that no biologist imagines that complex structures arise in a single step.

So far, we have been able to study only one evolving system and we cannot wait for interstellar flight to provide us with a second. If we want to discover generalizations about evolving systems, we will have to look at artificial ones.

Scientific theories tell us what is possible myths tell us what is desirable. Both are needed to guide proper action.

The evolution of sex is the hardest problem in evolutionary biology.

Paradoxically, it has turned out that game theory is more readily applied to biology than to the field of economic behavior for which it was originally designed