Who wins a... competition [between two traits] is massively context sensitive.

There are lots of cases where we know more about how the world works than we do about how we know how it works. That's no paradox. Understanding the structure of galaxies is one thing, understanding how we understand the structure of galaxies is quite another. There isn't the slightest reason why the first should wait on the second and, in point of historical fact, it didn't. This bears a lot of emphasis; it turns up in philosophy practically everywhere you look.

...monetary exchanges have interesting things in common; Gresham's law, if true, says what one of these interesting things is. But what is interesting about monetary exchanges is surely not their commonalities under physical description. A natural kind like a monetary exchange could turn out to be co-extensive with a physical natural kind; but if it did, that would be an accident on a cosmic scale.

No doubt, intuitions deserve respect. ...[but] I think that it is always up for grabs what an intuition is an intuition of. At a minimum, it is surely sometimes up for grabs.

The content of a thought depends on its external relations; on the way that the thought is related to the world, not on the way that it is related to other thoughts.

I rather doubt that life has a meaning. If I thought perhaps it did, and I wanted to find out what its meaning is, I don't imagine I'd ask someone whose credentials consist of a PhD in philosophy.

The theory of natural selection reduces to a banal truth: if a kind of creature flourishes in a kind of situation, then there must be something about such creatures (or about such situations, or about both) in virtue of which it does so.