Natural Selection Quotes - Page 6

• 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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• 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.)

  Robert Wright

  Mean, Trying, Peculiar

  "The Moral Animal". Book by Robert Wright, www.wired.com. 1994.

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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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• The rule of thumb based into the brain by natural selection would not have been, Be nice to your kin and be nice to potential reciprocators. It would have been, Be nice to everybody, because everybody would have been included.

  Richard Dawkins

  Nice, Brain, Thumbs

  Source: newrepublic.com

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• Darwin repeatedly used the hypothesis of common ancestry as a platform on which to build his various ideas about testing hypotheses concerning natural selection. He also argued that adaptive similarities provide little or no evidence for common ancestry. Although this second claim needs to be fine-tuned, Darwin was right that ample evidence for common ancestry can exist even if none of the characteristics we observe were caused to evolve by natural selection.

  Elliott Sober

  Ideas, Littles, Ancestry

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• 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.

  Jerry Fodor

  Doe, Kind, Virtue

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• 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.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Design, Miracle, Looks

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• 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.

  Guy Maddin

  Want, Cameras, Watches

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• 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.

  Elliott Sober

  Population, Environment, Natural

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• If I want to keep making films for a few more years, I probably should be willing to adapt. I've sort of evolved into the filmmaker that I am because of natural selection anyway.

  Guy Maddin

  Years, Want, Film

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• Natural selection has ensured that each species achieves the requisite effect somehow, but it doesn't care, so to speak, how the trick is done.

  David Papineau

  Done, Care, Speak

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

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• If it takes several billion years to develop the building blocks which you need, like RNA and DNA, and then those can build multicellular life and then multicellular life can be honed with natural selection to a point where it becomes sentient like us, then at some point that sentient being can begin to manipulate the matter around it to build better sentient life.

  Neill Blomkamp

  Block, Dna, Years

  Source: collider.com

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• The fact that natural selection and evolution crafted essentially carbon and water into a mechanism that can think and be conscious means there's nothing in physics that says you cannot do that to a greater degree.

  Neill Blomkamp

  Mean, Thinking, Water

  Source: collider.com

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• This fundamental subject of Natural Selection will be treated at some length in the fourth chapter; and we shall then see how Natural Selection almost inevitably causes much Extinction of the less improved forms of life and induces what I have called Divergence of Character.

  Charles Darwin

  Character, Fundamentals, Extinction

  Charles Darwin (1870). “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: Or The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life”, p.12

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• The big picture, I think, is that common ancestry is evidentially prior to natural selection in Darwin's theory and in contemporary evolutionary biology as well.

  Elliott Sober

  Thinking, Ancestry, Common

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Natural Selection is not Evolution. Yet, ever since the two words have been in common use, the theory of Natural Selection has been employed as a convenient abbreviation for the theory of Evolution by means of Natural Selection, put forward by Darwin and Wallace. This has had the unfortunate consequence that the theory of Natural Selection itself has scarcely ever, if ever, received separate consideration.

  Ronald Fisher

  Mean, Two, Theory Of Evolution

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• Natural selection acts solely by accumulating slight successive favorable variations, it can produce no great or sudden modification; it can act only by very short steps.

  Charles Darwin

  Variation, Steps, Natural

  Charles Darwin (2015). “Delphi Complete Works of Charles Darwin (Illustrated)”, p.3702, Delphi Classics

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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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• It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection.

  Thomas Nagel

  Together, Natural, Results

  Thomas Nagel (2012). “Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False”, p.12, Oxford University Press

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• 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.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Generations, Paleontology, Fields

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• We have seen that in certain respects operant reinforcement resembles the natural selection of evolutionary theory. Just as genetic characteristics which arise as mutations are selected or discarded by their consequences, so novel forms of behavior are selected or discarded through reinforcement.

  B. F. Skinner

  Mutation, Reinforcement, Behavior

  B.F Skinner (1965). “Science And Human Behavior”, p.430, Simon and Schuster

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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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• That natural selection can produce changes within a type is disputed by no one, not even the staunchest creationist. But that it can transform one species into another — that, in fact, has never been observed.

  Robert J. Sawyer

  Facts, Natural, Type

  Robert J. Sawyer (2009). “Calculating God”, p.102, Macmillan

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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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