“Querying your own human brain works fine, as an adaptive instinct, if you need to predict other humans. If you deal with any other kind of optimization process — if, for example, you are the eighteenth-century theologian William Paley, looking at the complex order of life and wondering how it came to be — then anthropomorphism is flypaper for unwary scientists, a trap so sticky that it takes a Darwin to escape.”
Optional extra:
“Querying your own human brain works fine, as an adaptive instinct, if you need to predict other humans. If you deal with any other kind of optimization process — if, for example, you are the eighteenth-century theologian William Paley, looking at the complex order of life and wondering how it came to be — then anthropomorphism is flypaper for unwary scientists, a trap so sticky that it takes a Darwin to escape.”