A Quote by Elliott Sober

Another way to test hypotheses about adaptation is to consider trait variation across a group of species instead of focusing on the trait of a single species. Rather than seeking to explain why polar bears have fur of a certain thickness, one tries to explain why bears in colder climates have thicker fur than bears in warmer climates. The former problem is hard to solve, since it is hard to say exactly what fur thickness polar bears should have if natural selection guided the evolution of that trait.

Elliott Sober

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About Across Adaptation Another Another Way Bears Certain Consider Evolution Exactly Exactly What Explain Focusing Former Fur Group Guided Hard Hypotheses Instead Natural Natural Selection Polar Polar Bears Problem Rather Say Seeking Selection Should Should Have Since Single Solve Species Test Than Thicker Thickness Trait Tries Variation Warmer Way Why

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Elliott Sober
Philosopher
Born: June 6, 1948

It's Earth Day today. Let me tell you something about polar bears. They're endangered but you have to be careful because a polar bear is one of the few animals that will stalk a human. If you go to where polar bears live, it might stalk you and when you're on the plane going home, it might be behind you reading.

Craig Ferguson

Listing the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act could harm bear conservation efforts by eliminating revenues from the carefully-regulated sport hunting of polar bears by Americans and the importation of polar bear meat and trophies into the U.S. As hunting by non-Americans would replace hunting by Americans, nothing would be accomplished in terms of reducing the number of polar bears killed, but the revenue currently generated by American sport hunters for conservation and research efforts would be eliminated.

Amy Ridenour

Polar bears did very well in the warmer times. They didn't die out at all; they didn't die out in the last 10,000 years, nor during the previous interglacial, nor the one before that. So, they're just used as a deceitful heartthrob; you know, to pluck your heartstrings because the polar bears might die out.

Piers Corbyn

A lot of the time, because of the polar bears you're not allowed to go outside the door without your hunting rifle, even if it's to go to the local shop. The polar bears will come from nowhere, and you'll be eaten alive.

Richard Dormer

Polar bears can swim 100 miles. They aren't like us. We might be 'stranded' on an ice floe if there's no land nearby, and we had no helicopter and no jet ski. We might be in trouble, but they're polar bears, and they can live in icy cold water by design. They love it.

Rush Limbaugh

The metaphor I routinely use is polar bears in the Sahara desert. You take creatures adapted to the cold and put them in the heat, the very traits that allow them to survive in one environment will conspire against them in the other. We are polar bears in the Sahara with one important distinction: we are smarter than the average bear. Once we identify the nature of the problem, we can think our way out of it. But it begins by acknowledging you didn't fail because you couldn't succeed. Because you didn't even know what the scope of the problem was. It's not your fault.

David Katz

I'd rather write about polar bears than people.

Mary Oliver

I'm very pessimistic about the future of the human species. We have been so indifferent to life on the whole that it will take its toll. It's not just the polar bears that are having a hard time; what we're doing is gradually impoverishing and poisoning the whole of the rest of life.

W. S. Merwin

If the organisms in a species now have trait T, and this trait now helps those organisms to survive and reproduce because the trait has effect E, a natural hypothesis to consider is that T evolved in the lineage leading to those current organisms because T had effect E. This hypothesis is "natural," but it often isn't true!

Elliott Sober

Mama grizzlies mate later than other bears. They have two cubs instead of four. They wait four years - about twice as long as other bears - between having cubs. And after they're pregnant, if winter is hard or their health is not good or the food supply is uncertain, they re-absorb the embryo into their body.

Gloria Steinem

Bears are extremely human, even down to their footprints. But I am also a fly fisherman, so I have fished beside brown bears in Alaska and was once charged by a black bear. I love bears.

Joseph Monninger

We'll all die out eventually. Humans will be gone. And all I'm saying is, when people worry about polar bears disappearing or whatever, it's like, well that's life, things will come and go, we'll find new species...

Karl Pilkington

We'll all die out eventually. Humans will be gone. And all I'm saying is, when people worry about polar bears disappearing or whatever, it's like, 'Well that's life, things will come and go, we'll find new species.'

Karl Pilkington

There is no sense in meddling with the extinction of polar bears, not when so many more pressing human problems await. Until there's ironclad proof of how and why extinction works, and how much evil we've done to hasten it along, I'm going to save my emotional anguish for dying and suffering members of my own species.

S.E. Cupp

There's no point bleating about the future of pandas, polar bears and tigers when we're not addressing the one single factor putting more pressure on the eco system than any other - namely the ever-increasing population.

Chris Packham

I would rather my constituents were warm and prosperous than cold and impoverished as we are overtaken by emerging markets who understandably put people before polar bears.

Jacob Rees-Mogg

A Quote by Elliott Sober

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