In 2010, my two Harvard mathematician colleagues and I dismantled kin-selection theory, which was the reigning theory of the origin of altruism at the time.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Before Darwin, our world was very religious. People saw altruism as something given by God for us to be good so that we could go to Paradise.
Theorists have wonderful ideas which take years and years to be verified.
Even the greatest mathematicians, the ones that we would put into our mythology of great mathematicians, had to do a great deal of leg work in order to get to the solution in the end.
Things are still in early stages, but one can imagine that as we build up and systematize our theories of these associations, and try to boil them down to their core, the result might point us toward the sort of fundamental principles I advocate.
The scientific study of labor economics provided the opportunity for me to unite theory with evidence my lifetime intellectual passion.
Guided only by their feeling for symmetry, simplicity, and generality, and an indefinable sense of the fitness of things, creative mathematicians now, as in the past, are inspired by the art of mathematics rather than by any prospect of ultimate usefulness.
Genetic theories, I gather, have been cherished academically with detachment.
There's no such thing as altruism.
Rigour is to the mathematician what morality is to men.
As I say, there was this movement to try to bring philosophers and mathematicians together into an organization where they would talk to each other. An organization wasn't effective unless you had a journal. That's about all I know.