Selection Quotes - Page 14

• 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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• Economy is a distributive virtue, and consists not in saving but in selection.

  Edmund Burke

  Saving, Virtue, Economy

  Edmund Burke (1834). “The Beauties of Burke, Consisting of Selections from His Works”, p.59

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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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• When the poet makes his perfect selection of a word, he is endowing the word with life.

  John Drinkwater

  Perfect, Poet

  John Drinkwater (1922). “The Lyric: An Essay”, p.30, Library of Alexandria

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• It is well to open one's mind but only as a preliminary to closing it ... for the supreme act of judgment and selection.

  Irving Babbitt

  Mind, Judgment, Closing

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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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• 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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• 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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• Composition is a side issue. Its role in my selection of photographs is a negative one at best. By which I mean that the fascination of a photograph is not in its eccentric composition but in what it has to say: its information content. And, on the other hand, composition always also has its own fortuitous rightness.

  Gerhard Richter

  Art, Mean, Issues

  Gerhard Richter, Dietmar Elger, Hans-Ulrich Obrist (2009). “Gerhard Richter: text : writings, interviews and letters, 1961-2007”

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• Everything has a reason, including the selection of the photos, which was not arbitrary but appropriate to the period, its highs and lows and my sense of them.

  Gerhard Richter

  Art, Arbitrary, Painting

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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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• Evolution thus is merely contingent on certain processes articulated by Darwin: variation and selection.

  Ernst Mayr

  Variation, Evolution, Process

  Ernst Mayr (1988). “Toward a New Philosophy of Biology: Observations of an Evolutionist”, p.457, Harvard University Press

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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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• One reason that a truth and reconciliation process is needed for group selection is to return to the simplicity of the original problem and Darwin’s solution. As Ed Wilson and I put it in our recent review article titled “Rethinking the Theoretical Foundation of Sociobiology“: Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.

  David Sloan Wilson

  Selfish, Simplicity, Foundation

  "Truth and Reconciliation for Group Selection II: The Original Problem" by David Sloan Wilson, www.huffingtonpost.com. January 1, 2009.

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• The selection of a Republican candidate for the presidency of this globalized and expansive empire is - and I mean this seriously - the greatest competition of idiocy and ignorance that has ever been.

  Fidel Castro

  Ignorance, Mean, Competition

  "Made in the World". www.nytimes.com. January 28, 2012.

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• Proponents of intelligent design don't accept that some of the very complex nanomachines that we have inside ourselves could have come about solely on the basis of natural selection.

  Francis Collins

  Intelligent, Design, Natural

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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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• 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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• High finance isn't burglary or obtaining money by false pretenses, but rather a judicious selection from the best features of those fine arts.

  Finley Peter Dunne

  Art, Finance, Burglary

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• As a means of variation from a normal type, sickness in childhood ought to have a certain value not to be classed under any fitness or unfitness of natural selection; and especially scarlet fever affected boys seriously, both physically and in character, though they might through life puzzle themselves to decide whether it had fitted or unfitted them for success.

  Henry Adams

  Character, Mean, Boys

  Henry Adams (2015). “The Education of Henry Adams”, p.10, Booklassic

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• I still reject lead roles, as I don't accept any role if I don't find it challenging enough. I am very careful while making selections.

  Boman Irani

  Challenges, Roles, Enough

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• The chief danger to philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Philosophy, Danger, Chiefs

  Alfred North Whitehead (2010). “Process and Reality”, p.337, Simon and Schuster

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• It was in France that I first learned about food. And that even the
  selection of a perfect pear, a ripe piece of Brie, the freshest butter,
  the highest quality cream were as important as how the dish you
  were going to be served was actually cooked.

  Robert Carrier

  Perfect, Quality, Important

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