Natural Selection Quotes - Page 4

• 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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• Suffering is a byproduct of evolution by natural selection, an inevitable consequence that may worry us in our more sympathetic moments but cannot be expected to worry a tiger - even if a tiger can be said to worry about anything at all - and certainly cannot be expected to worry its genes.

  Richard Dawkins

  Worry, Suffering, Nihilism

  Richard Dawkins (2009). “The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution”, p.392, Simon and Schuster

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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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• Just as the design of our bodies can be understood only in terms of natural selection, so the design of our minds can be understood only in terms of memetic selection.

  Susan Blackmore

  Design, Mind, Body

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• The question is: exactly how did life get here? Was it by natural selection and random mutation or was it by something else? Everybody - even Richard Dawkins - sees design in biology. You see this design when you see co-ordinated parts coming together to perform a function - like in a hand. And so it's the appearance of design that everybody's trying to explain. So that if Darwin's theory doesn't explain it we're left with no other explanation than maybe it really was designed. That's essentially the design argument.

  Michael Behe

  Design, Trying, Together

  Source: www.theguardian.com

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• Natural selection is not gene centrist and nor is biology all about genes; our comprehending minds are a result of our fast evolving culture.

  Daniel Dennett

  Mind, Culture, Biology

  "Daniel Dennett: 'I don't like theory of mind'". Interview with Carole Jahme, www.theguardian.com. March 22, 2013.

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• The traditional view of purpose says it comes from on high, from God, from the Creator. Darwin's idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition. Whereas people used to think of meaning coming from on high and being ordained from the top down, now we have Darwin saying, "No, all of this design can happen, all of this purpose can emerge from the bottom up without any direction at all."

  Daniel Dennett

  Thinking, Views, Ideas

  "Big Thinkers on Evolution". "NOVA", www.pbs.org. October 6, 2009.

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• Culture represents a novelty in the world of nature, and it could have added an effective, unifying edge to the forces of natural selection.

  Richard Leakey

  Nature, Culture, World

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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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• Natural selection operates according to immediate cirumstances and not toward a long-term goal. Homo sapiens did eventually evolve as a descendant of the first humans, but there was nothing inevitable about it.

  Richard Leakey

  Long, Goal, Firsts

  "The Origin of Humankind". Book by Richard Leakey, 1994.

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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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• In one of my latest conversations with Darwin he expressed himself very gloomily on the future of humanity, on the ground that in our modern civilization natural selection had no play, and the fittest did not survive. Those who succeed in the race for wealth are by no means the best or the most intelligent, and it is notorious that our population is more largely renewed in each generation from the lower than from the middle and upper classes.

  Alfred Russel Wallace

  Mean, Intelligent, Race

  Alfred Russel Wallace (1991). “Alfred Russel Wallace: An Anthology of His Shorter Writings”, Oxford University Press, USA

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• What had been released into the desert vacuum and starry oases of the galaxy was the inexorable logic of reproduction and natural selection. What followed was parasitism, predation, symbiosis, interdependency chaos, complexity, life.

  Robert Charles Wilson

  Oasis, Vacuums, Desert

  Robert Charles Wilson (2011). “Vortex”, p.304, Macmillan

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• The basic formulation, or bare-bones mechanics, of natural selection is a disarmingly simple argument, based on three undeniable facts (overproduction of offspring, variation, and heritability) and one syllogistic inference (natural selection, or the claim that organisms enjoying differential reproductive success will, on average, be those variants that are fortuitously better adapted to changing local environments, and that these variants will then pass their favored traits to offspring by inheritance).

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Simple, Average, Atheism

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• As Stephen Jay Gould pointed out in Time, in no other Western country is the teaching of Evolution regarded as controversial. Throughout the world, one way or another, most Christian denominations have managed to reconcile belief in God with belief in the mechanisms of natural selection. A French or German or Scandinavian politician who called for students to entertain as a reasonable deduction from existing evidence the proposition that Earth is at most 10,000 years old would be bundled off to a mental hospital.

  Katha Pollitt

  Christian, Country, Teaching

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• If I were to give a prize for the single best idea anybody ever had, I'd give it to Darwin for the idea of natural selection - ahead of Newton, ahead of Einstein - because his idea unites the two most disparate features of our universe: the world of purposeless, meaningless matter and motion, particles jostling on the one side, and the world of meaning and purpose, design on the other.

  Daniel Dennett

  Ideas, Two, Giving

  "Big Thinkers on Evolution". NOVA-PBS, www.pbs.org. October 6, 2009.

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• After Darwin, God's role changes from being the designer of all creatures great and small to being the designer of the laws of nature, from which natural selection can unfold, to being perhaps just the chooser of the laws. By the time God's role has been so diminished, he becomes a bit like a constitutional monarch, presiding ceremonially but not having any more work to do. That's a place for God if it makes people comfortable to keep God as the presider over the universe. I suppose that is satisfying for many.

  Daniel Dennett

  Law, People, Roles

  "Big Thinkers on Evolution". NOVA Interview, www.pbs.org. October 6, 2009.

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• 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.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Together, Three, Variation

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Natural selection is just three factors - over-production, variation, and inheritance combined to produce adaptation to changing local environments. It's not a principle or progress; it's just a principle of local adaptation. You don't make better creatures in any cosmic sense; you make creatures that are better suited to the changing climates of their local habitats.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Progress, Climate, Principles

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Unfortunately, the optimistic view that "classical civilization" handed down certain fundamental works that managed to include the knowledge contained in the lost writings has proved groundless. In fact, in the face of a general regression in the level of civilization, it's never the best works that will be saved through an automatic process of natural selection.

  Lucio Russo

  Writing, Optimistic, Views

  Lucio Russo, Silvio (translator) Levy (2013). “The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why it Had to Be Reborn”, p.8, Springer Science & Business Media

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• Human rights are an aspect of natural law, a consequence of the way the universe works, as solid and as real as photons or the concept of pi. The idea of self- ownership is the equivalent of Pythagoras' theorem, of evolution by natural selection, of general relativity, and of quantum theory. Before humankind discovered any of these, it suffered, to varying degrees, in misery and ignorance.

  L. Neil Smith

  Real, Ignorance, Self

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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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• 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.

  John Maynard Smith

  Theory Of Evolution, May, Facts

  John Maynard Smith (1993). “The Theory of Evolution”, p.15, Cambridge University Press

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• 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.

  Simon Conway Morris

  Real, World, Limits

  "The Crucible of Creation". Book by Simon Conway Morris, 1998.

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• ...we must be wary of granting too much power to natural selection by viewing all basic capacities of our brain as direct adaptations.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Brain, Too Much Power, Adaptation

  Stephen Jay Gould (2006). “The Mismeasure of Man (Revised & Expanded)”, p.233, W. W. Norton & Company

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