Top 1200 Natural Selection Quotes & Sayings - Page 3

My own field of paleontology has strongly challenged the Darwinian premise that life's major transformations can be explained by adding up, through the immensity of geological time, the successive tiny changes produced generation after generation by natural selection.

It is a shock to us in the twentieth century to discover, from observations science has made, that the fundamental mechanisms of life cannot be ascribed to natural selection, and therefore were designed. But we must deal with our shock as best we can and go on.

Natural selection is not the wind which propels the vessel, but the rudder which, by friction, now on this side and now on that, shapes the course.

Natural Selection never made it come to pass, as a habit of nature, that an unsupported stone should move downwards rather than upwards. It applies to no part of inorganic nature, and is very limited even in the phenomena of organic life.

You put three facts together - that all organisms produce more offspring that can survive, that there's variation among organisms, and that at least some of that variation is inherited - and the syllogistic inference is natural selection.

No history can be a faithful mirror. If it were, it would be as long and as dull as life itself. It must be a selection, and, being a selection, must inevitably be biased.

Human social institutions can effect the course of human evolution. Just as climate, food supply, predators, and other natural forces of selection have molded our nature, so too can our culture.

The positive evidence for Darwinism is confined to small-scale evolutionary changes like insects developing insecticide resistance....Evidence like that for insecticide resistance confirms the Darwinian selection mechanism for small-scale changes, but hardly warrants the grand extrapolation that Darwinists want. It is a huge leap going from insects developing insecticide resistance via the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection and random variation to the very emergence of insects in the first place by that same mechanism.

The right to live does not connote the right of each man to reproduce his kind ... As we lessen the stringency of natural selection, and more and more of the weaklings and the unfit survive, we must increase the standard, mental and physical, of parentage.

All scientists agree that evolution has occurred - that all life comes from a common ancestry, that there has been extinction, and that new taxa, new biological groups, have arisen. The question is, is natural selection enough to explain evolution? Is it the driver of evolution?

Natural selection involves no plan, no goal, and no direction — just genes increasing and decreasing in frequency depending on whether individuals with those genes have, relative to other individuals, greater or lesser reproductive success.

Whether you like it or not, the digital age has produced a new format for modern romance, and natural selection may be favoring the quick-thumbed quip peddler over the confident, ice-breaking alpha male.

A complete theory of evolution must acknowledge a balance between "external" forces of environment imposing selection for local adaptation and "internal" forces representing constraints of inheritance and development. Vavilov placed too much emphasis on internal constraints and downgraded the power of selection. But Western Darwinians have erred equally in practically ignoring (while acknowledging in theory) the limits placed on selection by structure and development what Vavilov and the older biologists would have called "laws of form.

. . . by natural selection our mind has adapted itself to the conditions of the external world. It has adopted the geometry most advantageous to the species or, in other words, the most convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.

We may consequently state the fundamental theorem of Natural Selection in the form: The rate of increase in fitness of any organism at any time is equal to its genetic variance in fitness at that time.

Memetics provides a new approach to the evolution of language in which we apply Darwinian thinking to two replicators, not one. On this theory, memetic selection, as well as genetic selection, does the work of creating language.

Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can only be a proximate explanation. A plane or a car is explained by a designer but that's because the designer himself, the engineer, is explained by natural selection.

All scientists agree that evolution has occurred-that all life comes from a common ancestry, that there has been extinction, and that new taxa, new biological groups, have arisen. The question is, is natural selection enough to explain evolution? Is it the driver of evolution?

Zoocentrism is the primary fallacy of human sociobiology, for this view of human behavior rests on the argument that if the actions of "lower" animals with simple nervous systems arise as genetic products of natural selection, then human behavior should have a similar basis.

anyone who writes about "Darwin's theory of evolutionin the singular, without segregating the theories of gradual evolution, common descent, speciation, and the mechanism of natural selection, will be quite unable to discuss the subject competently.

Nowhere was Darwin able to point to one bona fide case of natural selection having actually generated evolutionary change in nature....Ultimately, the Darwinian theory of evolution is no more nor less than the great cosmogenic myth of the twentieth century.

There is no other species on Earth that does science. It is, so far, entirely a human invention, evolved by natural selection in the cerebral cortex for one simple reason: it works. It is not perfect. It can be misused. It is only a tool. But it is by far the best tool we have, self-correcting, ongoing, applicable to everything.

It is good to keep in mind ... that nobody has ever succeeded in producing even one new species by the accumulation of micromutations. Darwin's theory of natural selection has never had any proof, yet it has been universally accepted.

I don't even know what my natural colour is. Natural? What is natural? What is that? I do not believe in totally natural for women. For me, natural has something to do with vegetables.

Each of you possesses the most powerful, dangerous and subversive trait that natural selection has ever devised. It's a piece of neural audio technology for rewiring other people's minds. I'm talking about your language.

The millionaires are a product of natural selection ... the naturally selected agents of society for certain work. They get high wages and live in luxury, but the bargain is a good one for society.

The reason for natural selection's great success is that it provides a satisfying explanation of how evolution might have occurred: individual organisms vary, and if those variations are inherited, the successful ones will survive and propagate and pass down their desirable traits to succeeding generations.

It is essential for genetic material to be able to make exact copies of itself; otherwise growth would produce disorder, life could not originate, and favourable forms would not be perpetuated by natural selection.

Why do people believe that there are dangerous implications of the idea that the mind is a product of the brain, that the brain is organized in part by the genome, and that the genome was shaped by natural selection?

One of the important things about religion is that it is a sphere which is partially protected from selection. Religious creativity occurs when people pull out of the whole selectivity issue. Becoming celibate - obviously you couldn't be less selective that that. Yes, selection is always in the background. But it's not always there in the foreground. If you don't understand that, you're missing a lot.

Wenger simply doesn't like those who show a weakness. With him you generally feel as if you were in the army. It's only in public that he may appear to be some sort of man of liberal views. In reality, his credo is natural selection.

Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is the only workable explanation that has ever been proposed for the remarkable fact of our own existence, indeed the existence of all life wherever it may turn up in the universe.

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.

Must we wait for selection to solve the problems of overpopulation, exhaustion of resources, pollution of the environment and a nuclear holocaust, or can we take explicit steps to make our future more secure? In the latter case, must we not transcend selection?

One is that you legislate according to natural selection, the other is that you don't. You have compassion, you try and help people. It's a fundamental clash between two people who happen to love each other, which complicates everything.

We're all puppets, and our best hope for even partial liberation is to try to decipher the logic of the puppeteer. Just because natural selection created us doesn't mean we have to slavishly follow its peculiar agenda. (If anything, we might be tempted to spite it for all the ridiculous baggage it's saddled us with.)

It is natural selection that gives direction to changes, orients chance, and slowly, progressively produces more complex structures, new organs, and new species. Novelties come from previously unseen association of old material. To create is to recombine.

I am quite sure that our views on evolution would be very different had biologists studied genetics and natural selection before and not after most of them were convinced that evolution had occurred.

The underlying reason for convergence seems to be that all organisms are under constant scrutiny of natural selection and are also subject to the constraints of the physical and chemical factors that severely limit the action of all inhabitants of the biosphere. Put simply, convergence shows that in a real world not all things are possible.

Space doesn't offer an escape from Earth's problems. And even with nuclear fuel, the transit time to nearby stars exceeds a human lifetime. Interstellar travel is therefore, in my view, an enterprise for post-humans, evolved from our species not via natural selection, but by design.

Natural selection shaped the human brain to be drawn toward aspects of nature that enhance our survival and reproduction, like verdant landscapes and docile creatures. There is no payoff to getting the warm fuzzies in the presence of rats, snakes, mosquitoes, cockroaches, herpes simplex and the rabies virus.

Giving the cat a name, like marriage, is not an easy thing. Soon I experienced the selection of name for a baby, a dog, a book, a warship, a sports team, even the king, the pope or a hurricane is just child's play compared to the selection of the cat's name.

Evolutionary game theory was originally developed as an alternative to the hypothesis of group selection; now it is clear that game theory models postulate group selection, even if they do not use the g-word.

Homo sapiens, the first truly free species, is about to decommission natural selection, the force that made us. Soon we must look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become.

We live in a cultural milieu ... The idea that culture is our ecological niche is still applicable. The impact and force of natural selection on the human physique are conditioned by the dimensions of culture.

Natural selection deals ruthlessly with any population, bird or beaver, which fails to solve the problems of its environment with all those resources, learned or unlearned, which may be at its disposal.

If a woman can, by careful selection of a father and nourishment of herself, produce a citizen with efficient senses, sound organs and a good digestion, she should clearly be secured a sufficient reward for that natural service to make her willing to undertake and repeat it.

Natural selection based on the differential multiplication of variant types cannot exist before there is material capable of replicating itself and its own variations, that is, before the origination of specifically genetic material or gene-material.

There is no such thing as a natural boxer. A natural dancer has to practice hard. A natural painter has to paint all the time. Even a natural fool has to work at it.

The Galapagos Islands are probably the most famous wildlife-watching destination in the world. And no wonder - it's almost impossible to exaggerate the sheer spectacle of the place that provided inspiration for Charles Darwin's ground-breaking theory of natural selection.

She looks like a fairy tale, but yet feels so natural (natural, natural, natural) This one's a beast, but way to wonderful to be compared to an animal

They say, you know, about evolution, it surely happened because their fossil record shows that. Look, my body and your body are miracles of design. Scientists are pretending they have the answer as how we got this way when natural selection couldn't possibly have produced such machines.

Over time, however, the endless war in Iraq began to play a role in natural selection. Only idiots signed up; only idiots died. Back home, the average I.Q. soared.

If I hope to survive, I have to acknowledge the natural selection that goes on when film stocks and cameras are eliminated from the world. And film viewers won't want to watch the same thing over and over again from me.

In the wild, those traits that are adaptive for survival and reproductive advantage are brought out through natural selection. So cats that were fierce, furtive hunters, alert to the snapping of every twig, with coats that gave them good camouflage, would have been favored by evolution.

In the last few decades, mankind has sinned terribly against the law of natural selection. We haven't just maintained life unworthy of life, we have even allowed it to multiply.

Darwinian natural selection only yields adaptation to changing local environments, and better function in an immediate habitat might just as well be achieved by greater simplicity in form and behavior as by ever-increasing complexity.

Instagram has been around for what, maybe a couple of years? Already it has shut down some small blogs - it's a collector of others and those most followed. It's already a selection. I imagine this further selection will take place in the next two years. It's going to be very fast.

Trait X is fitter than trait Y in a population of organisms if those organisms have other biological traits T and live in an environment that has properties E. The theory of natural selection is filled with statements of this form.

To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.