Natural Selection Quotes - Page 9

• You know, Darwin said through natural selection things go gradually, and he was talking about pigeon's evolution or horses evolving, getting faster. But in fact if you look at evolution on a bigger scale, cosmic evolution and you look at culture evolution you see it jumps, it goes through phase changes, and that's very exciting.

  Charles Jencks

  Horse, Talking, Culture

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• If the evolutionary mechanism of natural selection depends on death, destruction, and violence of the strong against the weak, then these things are perfectly natural. On what basis, then, does the atheist judge the natural world to be horribly wrong, unfair, and unjust?

  Timothy Keller

  Strong, Atheist, Judging

  Timothy Keller (2008). “The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism”, p.45, Penguin

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• Natural selection saw to it that professional heroes who at a crucial moment tended to ask themselves questions like 'What is my purpose in life?' very quickly lacked both.

  Terry Pratchett

  Hero, Purpose, Saws

  Terry Pratchett (2008). “Interesting Times: (Discworld Novel 17)”, p.139, Random House

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• I could show fight on natural selection having done and doing more for the progress of civilization than you seem inclined to admit. Remember what risk the nations of Europe ran, not so many centuries ago of being overwhelmed by the Turks, and how ridiculous such an idea now is! The more civilised so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world.

  Charles Darwin

  Struggle, Fighting, Ideas

  Charles Darwin (2016). “Life and Letters of Charles Darwin: the Evolution”, p.209, VM eBooks

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• The very comprehensibility of the world points to an intelligence behind the world. Indeed, science would be impossible if our intelligence were not adapted to the intelligibility of the world. The match between our intelligence and the intelligibility of the world is no accident. Nor can it properly be attributed to natural selection, which places a premium on survival and reproduction and has no stake in truth or conscious thought. Indeed, meat-puppet robots are just fine as the output of a Darwinian evolutionary process.

  William A. Dembski

  Serendipity, Survival, Meat

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• In short, evolution is as close to being a scientific fact as is possible for any theory, given that science is open - ended and no one can predict with certainty what may change in the future. The prospect that evolution by natural selection, at least as a broad mechanism, will be overthrown in the future is about as likely as the prospect of finding out some day that the Earth is really flat. Unfortunately, those who regard these scientific facts as a threat to faith have chosen to distort and misrepresent them to the public.

  Victor J. Stenger

  Religion, Atheism, Earth

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• The millionaires are a product of natural selection ... the naturally selected agents of society for certain work. They get high wages and live in luxury, but the bargain is a good one for society.

  William Graham Sumner

  Luxury, Wages, Agents

  William Graham Sumner (1914). “The challenge of facts: and other essays”

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• In the process of natural selection, then, any device that can insert a higher proportion of certain genes into subsequent generations will come to characterize the species.

  E. O. Wilson

  Science, Generations, Evolution

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• It is natural selection that gives direction to changes, orients chance, and slowly, progressively produces more complex structures, new organs, and new species. Novelties come from previously unseen association of old material. To create is to recombine.

  Francois Jacob

  Science, Giving, Association

  François Jacob, Nadine Peyrieras, Michel Morange (2002). “Travaux scientifiques de François Jacob”, p.709, Odile Jacob

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• This preservation of favourable variations and the destruction of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest. Variations neither useful nor injurious would not be affected by natural selection and would be left a fluctuating element.

  Charles Darwin

  Science, Survival, Would Be

  Charles Darwin (1869). “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: Or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”, p.92

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• As natural selection acts by competition, it adapts the inhabitants of each country only in relation to the degree of perfection of their associates; so that we need feel no surprise at the inhabitants of any one country, although on the ordinary view supposed to have been specially created and adapted for that country, being beaten and supplanted by the naturalised productions from another land.

  Charles Darwin

  Country, Views, Land

  Charles Darwin (2012). “On the Origin of Species: By Means of Natural Selection”, p.296, Courier Corporation

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• The new advocates of ID [Intelligent Design] ask that their ideas be judged by scientific, not religious, criteria. OK, let's see how well ID stacks up as a scientific alternative to Darwinism. To gauge how well ID is doing as a platform for scientific research, I logged into the best database of the biological literature. A search for keyword ''evolution'' yielded 24,000 hits in the last decade. A search for ''intelligent design'' yielded not a single piece of research. Evolution by natural selection remains the basis of every successful biological research program.

  Chet Raymo

  Religious, Successful, Intelligent

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• By the cold Darwinian logic of natural selection, evolution codifies happenstance into strategy.

  David Quammen

  Logic, Evolution, Cold

  David Quammen (2012). “Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic”, p.17, W. W. Norton & Company

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• In the last few decades, mankind has sinned terribly against the law of natural selection. We haven't just maintained life unworthy of life, we have even allowed it to multiply.

  David Klinghoffer

  Law, Lasts, Natural

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• An argument often given for why Earth couldn't host another form of life is that once the life we know became established, it would have eliminated any competition through natural selection. But if another form of life were confined to its own niche, there would be little direct competition with regular life.

  Paul Davies

  Competition, Would Be, Earth

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• Natural selection certainly operates. It explains how bacteria will gain antibiotic resistance; it will explain how insects get insecticide resistance, but it doesn't explain how you get bacteria or insects in the first place.

  William A. Dembski

  Antibiotics, Bacteria, Gains

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• Although I insist that God has always had the power to intervene directly in nature to create new forms, I am willing to be per-suaded that He chose not to do so and instead employed secondary natural causes like random mutation and natural selection.

  Phillip E. Johnson

  Mutation, Causes, Natural

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• Airplanes were invented by natural selection. Now you can say that intelligent design designs our airplanes of today, but there was no intelligent design really designing those early airplanes. There were probably at least 30,000 different things tried, and when they crash and kill the pilot, don't try that again.

  Burt Rutan

  Airplane, Intelligent, Design

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• In however complex a manner this feeling may have originated, as it is one of high importance to all those animals which aid and defend one another, it will have been increased through natural selection; for those communities, which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring.

  Charles Darwin

  Animal, Numbers, Community

  Charles Darwin (1875). “The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex”, p.107

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• Mr. Darwin ... has failed to hold definitely before his mind the principle that the difference of sex, whatever it may consist in, must itself be subject to natural selection and to evolution.

  Antoinette Brown Blackwell

  Sex, Differences, Mind

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• The language we're exchanging, the fillings in our teeth, the pavement on the road outside, everywhere you look, for better or for worse, you're going to see evidence that accepting reality is not a human's tendency, and not what we're good at, and not, in my speculation, what God or Natural Selection hired us to do. We've been hired, by this universe, to dream, to aspire, to make things that weren't real real - and because that involves a lot of failure, we're damn good at doing that, too.

  Dan Harmon

  Dream, Real, Teeth

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• Natural selection eliminates and maybe maintains, but it doesn't create.

  Lynn Margulis

  Natural, Selection

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• Alfred Russel Wallace, the codiscoverer of the theory of natural selection. Following their twin announcements of the theory in 1858, both Darwin and Wallace struggled like Laocoöns with the serpentine problem of human evolution and its encoiling difficulty of consciousness. But where Darwin clouded the problem with his own naivete, seeing only continuity in evolution, Wallace could not do so.

  Julian Jaynes

  Twins, Evolution, Problem

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• I fully agree with all that you say on the advantages of Spencer's excellent expression of 'the survival of the fittest.' This, however, had not occurred to me till reading your letter. It is, however, a great objection to this term that it cannot be used as a substantive governing a verb; and that this is a real objection I infer from H. Spencer continually using the words, natural selection.

  Charles Darwin

  Real, Reading, Expression

  Charles Darwin (2015). “Delphi Complete Works of Charles Darwin (Illustrated)”, p.10473, Delphi Classics

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• The growth of our knowledge is the result of a process closely resembling what Darwin called 'natural selection'; that is, the natural selection of hypotheses: our knowledge consists, at every moment, of those hypotheses which have shown their (comparative) fitness by surviving so far in their struggle for existence, a competitive struggle which eliminates those hypotheses which are unfit.

  Karl Popper

  Struggle, Knowledge, Science

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