Natural Selection Quotes - Page 4

• 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.

  Michael Behe

  Fundamentals, Goes On, Natural

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• It was a shock to people of the nineteenth century when they discovered, from observations science had made, that many features of the biological world could be ascribed to the elegant principle of natural selection.

  Michael Behe

  People, Principles, World

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• Since natural selection requires a function to select, an irreducibly complex biological system, if there is such a thing, would have to arise as an integrated unit for natural selection to have anything to act on.

  Michael Behe

  Natural, Select, Arise

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• The difficulty of looking at a system like natural selection if you have any sort of moral sense yourself, is almost what makes it beautiful.

  Paul Bettany

  Beautiful, Moral, Natural

  "Paul Bettany: Playing Darwin with Creation". Interview with Adam Rutherford, www.theguardian.com. February 11, 2009.

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• 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.

  Mark Carwardine

  Inspiration, Islands, World

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• Animals can adapt to problems and make inventions, but often no faster than natural selection can do its work - the world acts as its own simulator in the case of natural selection.

  Vernor Vinge

  Animal, World, Problem

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• 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.

  Robert Ardrey

  Bird, Population, May

  ROBERT ARDREY (1966). “THE TERRITORIAL IMPERATIVE”

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• In the study of this membrane [the retina] I for the first time felt my faith in Darwinism (hypothesis of natural selection) weakened, being amazed and confounded by the supreme constructive ingenuity revealed not only in the retina and in the dioptric apparatus of the vertebrates but even in the meanest insect eye. ... I felt more profoundly than in any other subject of study the shuddering sensation of the unfathomable mystery of life.

  Santiago Ramon y Cajal

  Eye, Science, Research

  Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1989). “Recollections of My Life”, p.576, MIT Press

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• What could not be denied was that in vast segments of the animal world natural selection of the most qualified individuals took place not by competition for females but by competition for space.

  Robert Ardrey

  Animal, Space, Competition

  ROBERT ARDREY (1961). “AFRICAN GENISIS”

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• 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.

  Bill Nighy

  Compassion, Two, People

  Interview with Sarah Crompton, www.telegraph.co.uk. June 10, 2014.

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• Darwin's principle of natural selection leads to the prediction that the proper way to analyze any evolutionary development is to see the new features as adaptive to environments. And that's a perfectly good principle. The problem is that there are many evolutionary biologists who view everything that happens in evolution as directly evolved for adaptive benefit. And that just doesn't work. Whenever you build a structure for adaptive reasons, the structure is going to exhibit properties that have nothing to do with adaptation. They're just side consequences.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Evolution, Problem, Environment

  Interview With Michael Krasny, www.motherjones.com. January/February 1997.

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• Natural selection must be replaced by eugenical artificial selection. This idea constitutes the sound core of eugenics, the applied science of human betterment.

  Theodosius Dobzhansky

  Ideas, Eugenics, Sound

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• Natural selection is not the only process that changes organisms over time. But is the only process that seemingly designs organisms over time.

  Steven Pinker

  Design, Evolution, Natural

  Steven Pinker (2009). “How the Mind Works”, p.158, W. W. Norton & Company

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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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• 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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• There is economics in biology, nothing is free, everything has to be paid for, there are costs as well as benefits to everything in life, for example, there was never sufficient natural selection pressure to develop better eyes, individuals could earn other things like smiley smiles rather than waste energy & time on better eyes.

  Richard Dawkins

  Eye, Energy, Example

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• Artificial selection turned the wolf into the shepherd, and the wild grasses into wheat and corn. In fact, almost every plant and animal that we eat today was bred from a wild, less edible ancestor. If artificial selection can work such profound changes in only ten or fifteen thousand years, what can natural selection do operating over billions of years? The answer is all the beauty and diversity of life.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Animal, Years, Profound

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• Societies would _not_ be better off if everyone were like Mr Spock, all rationality and no emotion. Instead, a balance - a teaming up of the internal rivals - is optimal for brains. ... Some balance of the emotional and rational systems is needed, and that balance may already be optimized by natural selection in human brains.

  David Eagleman

  Emotional, Brain, Balance

  David Eagleman (2011). “Incognito: The Secret Lives of The Brain”, p.95, Canongate Books

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• But of course, what the eagle does not realize is that it is participating in a very crude form of natural selection.One day a tortoise will learn how to fly.

  Terry Pratchett

  Eagles, One Day, Doe

  Terry Pratchett (2008). “Small Gods: (Discworld Novel 13)”, p.10, Random House

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• 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.

  Ted Rall

  War, Home, Average

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• 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.

  E. O. Wilson

  Science, Wish, Looks

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• We add that it would be all too easy to object that mutations have no evolutionary effect because they are eliminated by natural selection. Lethal mutations (the worst kind) are effectively eliminated, but others persist as alleles. ...Mutants are present within every population, from bacteria to man. There can be no doubt about it. But for the evolutionist, the essential lies elsewhere: in the fact that mutations do not coincide with evolution.

  Pierre-Paul Grasse

  Lying, Men, Doubt

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• Natural selection does not give any preference at all to anything that, in the long run, could be advantageous for the species but blindly rewards everything that, momentarily, affords greater procreative success.

  Konrad Lorenz

  Running, Long, Giving

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• In true natural selection, if a body has what it takes to survive, its genes automatically survive because they are inside it. So the genes that survive tend to be, automatically, those genes that confer on bodies the qualities that assist them to survive.

  Richard Dawkins

  Science, Survival, Quality

  Richard Dawkins (2015). “The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design”, p.65, W. W. Norton & Company

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• We are the one creature to whom natural selection has bequeathed a brain complex enough to comprehend the laws that govern the universe. And we should be proud that we are the only species that has figured how we came to be.

  Jerry A. Coyne

  Law, Brain, Proud

  Jerry A. Coyne (2009). “Why Evolution Is True”, p.233, Penguin

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