Natural Selection Quotes - Page 7

• 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. We are supposed to abandon this naïve response, not in favor of a fully worked out physical/chemical explanation but in favor of an alternative that is really a schema for explanation, supported by some examples. What is lacking, to my knowledge, is a credible argument that the story has a nonnegligible probability of being true.

  Thomas Nagel

  Together, Example, Alternatives

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• One of the effects of civilization is to diminish the rigour of the application of the law of natural selection. It preserves weakly lives that would have perished in barbarous lands.

  Francis Galton

  Law, Land, Civilization

  "Hereditary Talent and Character". MacMillan's Magazine, 12, 1865.

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• And yet, strange to say, now that this truth is recognized by most cultivated people — now that the beneficent working of the survival of the fittest has been so impressed on them that, much more than people in past times, they might be expected to hesitate before neutralizing its action — now more than ever before in the history of the world, are they doing all they can to further survival of the unfittest!

  Herbert Spencer

  People, Survival, World

  "The Man versus the State: Great Essays".

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• The survival or preservation of certain favoured words in the struggle for existence is natural selection.

  Charles Darwin

  Struggle, Survival, Natural

  Charles Darwin (2007). “The Descent of Man: The Concise Edition”, p.130, Penguin

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• 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.

  Chauncey Wright

  Life, Moving, Stones

  Chauncey Wright (2003). “Philosphical Discussions”, p.108, A&C Black

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• What an odd time to be a fundamentalist about adaptation and natural selection - when each major subdiscipline of evolutionary biology has been discovering other mechanisms as adjuncts to selection's centrality.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Odd, Biology, Adaptation

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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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• 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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• Quantitative work shows clearly that natural selection is a reality, and that, among other things, it selects Mendelian genes, which are known to be distributed at random through wild populations, and to follow the laws of chance in their distribution to offspring. In other words, they are an agency producing variation of the kind which Darwin postulated as the raw material on which selection acts.

  John B. S. Haldane

  Reality, Agency, Law

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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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• Ultimately, of course, you must decide for yourself whether the subjective psychological effects created by your evolved cognitive biases reflect an objective reality, perhaps as evidence that God designed your mind to be so receptive to Him. Or, just maybe, you will come to acknowledge that, like the rest of us, you are a hopeless pawn in one of natural selection's most successful hoaxes ever-and smile at the sheer ingenuity involved in pulling it off, at the very thought of such mindless cleverness. One can still enjoy the illusion of God, after all, without believing Him to be real.

  Jesse Bering

  Real, Believe, Successful

  Jesse Bering (2013). “The God Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny and the Meaning of Life”, p.16, Nicholas Brealey Publishing

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• The [peppered-moth] experiments show the effects of predation on the survival of the dark and of the normal forms of the Peppered Moth in a clean environment and in one polluted by smoke. The experiments beautifully demonstrate natural selection--or survival of the fittest--in action, but they do not show evolution in progress, for however the population may alter in their content of light, intermediate or dark forms, all the moths remain from beginning to end Biston Betularia.

  L. Harrison Matthews

  Dark, Light, Survival

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• If we want to sum up the theory of evolution by natural selection in two words, which have great relevance for all societies and businesses, we should simply remember: diversity works.

  Richard Koch

  Two, Theory Of Evolution, Diversity

  Richard Koch (2013). “The 80/20 Principle and 92 Other Powerful Laws of Nature: The Science of Success”, p.34, Nicholas Brealey Publishing

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• Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation forthe existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind's eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of the watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.

  Richard Dawkins

  Selfish, Eye, Sight

  The Blind Watchmaker ch. 1 (1986) See Paley 3

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• You can be a thorough-going Neo-Darwinian without imagination, metaphysics, poetry, conscience, or decency. For 'Natural Selection' has no moral significance: it deals with that part of evolution which has no purpose, no intelligence, and might more appropriately be called accidental selection, or better still, Unnatural Selection, since nothing is more unnatural than an accident. If it could be proved that the whole universe had been produced by such Selection, only fools and rascals could bear to live.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Imagination, Poetry, Intelligence

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• Time and again, my sociobiological colleagues have upbraided me as a turncoat, because I will not agree with them that the ultimate criterion for the success of a meme must be its contribution to Darwinian "fitness". At bottom, they insist, a "good meme" spreads because brains are receptive to it, and the receptiveness of brains is ultimately shaped by (genetic) natural selection.

  Richard Dawkins

  Brain, Natural, Criteria

  Richard Dawkins (2016). “The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene”, p.167, Oxford University Press

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• I wouldn't be a very good hunter without these glasses. I'm not a very good hunter with these glasses, but I'd be even worse without them, so that would put a crimp in how many kids I could have, so all of these medical advances have at least in some parts of the world blunted natural selection.

  Carl Zimmer

  Kids, Glasses, Hunters

  Source: bigthink.com

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• Natural selection is a theory of local adaptation to changing environments. It proposes no perfecting principles, no guarantee of general improvement

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Principles, Guarantees, Changing Environment

  Stephen Jay Gould (1992). “Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History”, p.45, W. W. Norton & Company

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• ... if variations useful to any organic being do occur, assuredly individuals thus characterized will have the best chance of being perserved in the struggle for life; and from the strong principle of inheritance they will tend to produce offsping similarly characterized. This principle of preservation, I have called, for the sake of brevity, Natural Selection.

  Charles Darwin

  Strong, Struggle, Principles

  Charles Darwin, Paul H. Barrett (1987). “The Works of Charles Darwin: On the origin of species 1959”

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• 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.

  Karl Pearson

  Men, Doe, Kind

  Karl Pearson (1912). “Darwinism, Medical Progress and Eugenics: The Cavendish Lecture, 1912, an Address to the Medical Profession”

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• I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term Natural Selection, in order to mark its relation to man's power of selection. But the expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient.

  Charles Darwin

  Men, Expression, Order

  On the Origin of Species, 5th ed., ch. 3 (1869) See Philander Johnson 1; Herbert Spencer 5; Herbert Spencer 6

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• In a knowledge economy, natural selection favors organizations that can most effectively harness and coordinate collective intellectual energy and creative capacity.

  Justin Rosenstein

  Organization, Creative, Intellectual

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• Nowadays theologians aren't quite so straightforward as Paley. They don't point to complex living mechanisms and say that they are self-evidently designed by a creator, just like a watch. But there is a tendency to point to them and say 'It is impossible to believe' that such complexity, or such perfection, could have evolved by natural selection. Whenever I read such a remark, I always feel like writing 'Speak for yourself' in the margin.

  Richard Dawkins

  Believe, Writing, Self

  Richard Dawkins (2015). “The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design”, p.46, W. W. Norton & Company

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