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"Can the Darwinian paradigm ever be driven by data after it has become the centerpiece of the dominant, all-encompassing naturalistic world view of Western culture? With evolutionists as cultural gurus, has the intellectual and philosophical investment in the cosmogenic myth become so heavy that evolutionary scientists can no longer be objective about evidence that may even remotely undermine this world view? Are they enslaved by the world view their paradigm has created?

"Cell and tissue, shell and bone, leaf and flower, are so many portions of matter, and it is in obedience to the laws of physics that their particles have been moved, moulded and conformed. They are no exceptions to the rule that God always geometrizes. Their problems of form are in the first instance mathematical problems, their problems of growth are essentially physical problems, and the morphologist is, ipso facto, a student of physical science."

— D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson

"The question I pose is whether historians and social scientists have much to gain from models of cultural evolution that treat cultural change as a kind of selection process. Can such models provide a unifying paradigm for the social sciences that plays the same role in the study of human culture that models of biological evolution play in biology as a whole?

As an explanatory theory of human behavior, dynamical models of cultural evolution and social learning hold more promise of success than models based on rational choice. Under the right conditions, evolutionary models supply a rationale for Nash equilibrium that rational choice theory is hard pressed to deliver. Furthermore, in cases with multiple symmetrical Nash equilibria, the dynamic models offer a plausible, historically path-dependent model of equilibrium selection. In conditions, such as those of correlated encounters, where the evolutionary dynamic theory is structurally at odds with the rational choice theory, the evolutionary theory provides the best account of human behavior."

— Brian Skyrms

"If, in 1901, a talented and sympathetic outsider had been called upon (say, by a granting-giving agency) to survey the sciences and name the branch which would be least fruitful in century ahead, his choice might well have settled upon mathematical logic, an exceedingly recondite field whose practitioners could all have fit into a small auditorium — algebraists consumed by abstractive passion, or philosophers pursuing fantasies of Leibnitz and Ramon Llull, or (like Whitehead) both.