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One of the great issues in biology is the origin of altruism - of why you would do something for someone else that could hurt you - and Darwin posited that it might be rooted in maternal instinct, in sacrificing yourself for your children.

Animals have genes for altruism, and those genes have been selected in the evolution of many creatures because of the advantage they confer for the continuing survival of the species.

There's no such thing as altruism.

Religion creates community, community creates altruism and altruism turns us away from self and towards the common good... There is something about the tenor of relationships within a religious community that makes it the best tutorial in citizenship and good neighborliness.

Unfortunately, anti-Darwinism keeps playing minor variations on the same negative themes and adds nothing to our understanding of life.

Darwin's idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition.

Altruism is innate, but it's not instinctual. Everybody's wired for it, but a switch has to be flipped.

Selfish genes actually explain altruistic individuals, and to me that's crystal-clear.

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.

Darwin himself recorded the fact that he accepted the Malthusian idea.