Selection Quotes - Page 2

• Humans are just a very, very small part of the panoply of life, and it is arguable that in a certain sense, humans have emancipated themselves from Darwinian selection.

  Richard Dawkins

  Certain, Humans, Small Parts

  "Belief" Interview, www.bbc.co.uk. April, 2004.

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• You just click and you get 18,000 screen shots on how to apply lipstick, for example, but there will be the same selection that has taken place in paper in digital, too.

  Franca Sozzani

  Taken, Digital, Example

  Source: wwd.com

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• You can look up "heart" and get 100,000 voices, but slowly the ones at the end are no longer credible, so there will be a selection in Web sites, too.

  Franca Sozzani

  Heart, Voice, Looks

  Source: wwd.com

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• Right now in the insurance markets, we have sort of a disaster unfolding, a downward spiral, adverse selection, premiums in the individual market going through the roof. People can't afford insurance and insurance companies are losing hundreds of millions of dollars. If you repeal part of Obamacare to get rid of the individual mandate but keep some of the ideas, that people can still buy insurance after they're sick, the situation gets extraordinarily worse. And so what we're seeing now could be tenfold greater if you only repeal part of Obamacare.

  Rand Paul

  Ideas, Obamacare, Sick

  Source: abcnews.go.com

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• People will say, "You're never going to convince me that something as complicated as an eye could come about by sheer chance." And the answer is that natural selection is the very opposite of sheer chance. Natural selection is a non-random process.

  Richard Dawkins

  Eye, Opposites, People

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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• We are nothing but the product of billions of years of molecules coming together and ratcheting up through natural selection, we are composed only of highways of fluids and chemicals sliding along roadways within billions of dancing cells, trillions of synaptic conversations hum in parallel, this vast egglike fabric of micron-thin circuitry runs algorithms undreamt of in modern science, and these neural programs give rise to our decision making, loves, desires, fears, and aspirations. That understanding would be a numinous experience, better than anything ever proposed in anyone's holy text.

  David Eagleman

  Running, Cells, Years

  Source: www.goodreads.com

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• Companies are actually much better than governments and other bureaucracies at organizing in a holistically efficient way the extremely complex path from the examination of molecules all the way to the delivery of medicines to patients. Already in the conception and selection of research projects, companies would anticipate all the challenges down the line that they will need to overcome in order to achieve actual health impact. Bureaucratic organizations, by contrast, are notoriously bad at this sort of optimizing.

  Thomas Pogge

  Government, Order, Organization

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• [Larry Laurenzano] gave me a junior high school saxophone to take to high school, because I was always taking one of our school horns home to practice and I couldn't afford to buy one. He gave my friend, Tyrone, a tuba and he gave me a junior high saxophone for each of us to use at Performing Arts High School with. My audition piece was selections from Rocky. We were not sophisticated. But we had some spirit about it. We enjoyed it, and it was a way out.

  Jon Gordon

  Art, Home, School

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• When environments change, they usually do so pretty rapidly, at rates with which adaptation by natural selection would be hard put to keep up. When such change occurs, the quality of your adaptation to your old habitat is irrelevant, and any competitive advantage you might have had may be eliminated at a stroke.

  Ian Tattersall

  Quality, Would Be, Habitat

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• The fundamental problem of Obamacare is the insurance mandates. When you mandate what has to be insurance, it elevates the price. And when you tell people they can buy insurance after they're sick, they will. And you get what's called adverse selection.

  Rand Paul

  Obamacare, People, Sick

  Source: abcnews.go.com

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• In the meantime, the educated public continues to believe that Darwin has provided all the relevant answers by the magic formula of random mutations plus natural selection -quite unaware of the fact that random mutations turned out to be irrelevant and natural selection tautology.

  Arthur Koestler

  Believe, Knowledge, Magic

  "Janus: A Summing Up". Book by Arthur Koestler, p. 184-5, 1983.

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• 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?

  Lynn Margulis

  Groups, Extinction, Ancestry

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• Never say, and never take seriously anyone who says, 'I cannot believe that so-and-so could have evolved by gradual selection.' I have dubbed this kind of fallacy 'the Argument from Personal Incredulity.' Time and again, it has proven the prelude to an intellectual banana-skin experience.

  Richard Dawkins

  Believe, Intellectual, Skins

  "River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life". Book by Richard Dawkins, March 20, 2014.

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• Today Charles Darwin is best known for establishing the fact of evolution and for recognizing the major role of natural selection in driving it.

  Jared Diamond

  Roles, Today, Facts

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• 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.

  Franca Sozzani

  Couple, Years, Two

  Source: wwd.com

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• Paleontologists [fossil experts] have paid an exorbitant price for Darwin's argument. We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life's history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we almost never see the very process we profess to study.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Views, Data, Fancy

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• Credibility is a must. Think of all those bloggers that kill us with photos outside the shows - there will be a selection there, too. Not because some are less good, but those that do not impose a style will have fewer requests.

  Franca Sozzani

  Thinking, Style, Credibility

  Source: wwd.com

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• Evolution works by selection, not by instruction. There is no final cause, no teleology, no purpose guiding the overall process

  Gerald Edelman

  Causes, Finals, Purpose

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• Tapping melons with your knuckles is a good way of making your selection in the store, but apparently it's frowned upon at the strip club.

  Brad Wilkerson

  Sex, Clubs, Knuckles

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• The challenge for me has first been to see things as they are, whether a portrait, a city street, or a bouncing ball. In a word, I have tried to be objective. What I mean by objectivity is not the objectivity of a machine, but of a sensible human being with the mystery of personal selection at the heart of it. The second challenge has been to impose order onto the things seen and to supply the visual context and the intellectual framework - that to me is the art of photography.

  Berenice Abbott

  Photography, Art, Mean

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• The passion for playing chess is one of the most unaccountable in the world. It slaps the theory of natural selection in the face. It is the most absorbing of occupations. The least satisfying of desires. A nameless excrescence upon life. It annihilates a man. You have, let us say, a promising politician, a rising artist that you wish to destroy. Dagger or bomb are archaic and unreliable - but teach him, inoculate him with chess.

  H. G. Wells

  Passion, Artist, Men

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• I believe that now and always the conscious selection of the best for reproduction will be impossible; that to propose it is to display a fundamental misunderstanding of what individuality implies. The way of nature has always been to slay the hindmost, and there is still no other way, unless we can prevent those who would become the hindmost being born. It is in the sterilization of failure, and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies.

  H. G. Wells

  Lying, Believe, Eugenics

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• Even in dialogue, your own style rules your selection. Do not give yourself a blank check of this kind: 'I'll merely reproduce what I think a character like so-and-so would say.' You have to reproduce it in the way your literary premises dictate.

  Ayn Rand

  Writing, Character, Thinking

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• In the most basic way, writers are defined not by the stories they tell, or their politics, or their gender, or their race, but by the words they use. Writing begins with language, and it is in that initial choosing, as one sifts through the wayward lushness of our wonderful mongrel English, that choice of vocabulary and grammar and tone, the selection on the palette, that determines who's sitting at that desk. Language creates the writer's attitude toward the particular story he's decided to tell.

  Donald E. Westlake

  Attitude, Writing, Vocabulary

  Donald E. Westlake (2014). “The Getaway Car: A Donald Westlake Nonfiction Miscellany”, p.28, University of Chicago Press

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• One writes such a story [The Lord of the Rings] not out of the leaves of trees still to be observed, nor by means of botany and soil-science; but it grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mold of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps. No doubt there is much personal selection, as with a gardener: what one throws on one's personal compost-heap; and my mold is evidently made largely of linguistic matter.

  J. R. R. Tolkien

  Writing, Mean, Dark

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