Selection Quotes - Page 5

• Never say, and never take seriously anyone who says, 'I cannot believe that so-and-so could have evolved by gradual selection.' I have dubbed this kind of fallacy 'the Argument from Personal Incredulity.' Time and again, it has proven the prelude to an intellectual banana-skin experience.

  Richard Dawkins

  Believe, Intellectual, Skins

  "River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life". Book by Richard Dawkins, March 20, 2014.

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• All scientists agree that evolution has occurred-that all life comes from a common ancestry, that there has been extinction, and that new taxa, new biological groups, have arisen. The question is, is natural selection enough to explain evolution? Is it the driver of evolution?

  Lynn Margulis

  Groups, Extinction, Ancestry

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• In the meantime, the educated public continues to believe that Darwin has provided all the relevant answers by the magic formula of random mutations plus natural selection -quite unaware of the fact that random mutations turned out to be irrelevant and natural selection tautology.

  Arthur Koestler

  Believe, Knowledge, Magic

  "Janus: A Summing Up". Book by Arthur Koestler, p. 184-5, 1983.

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• 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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• When environments change, they usually do so pretty rapidly, at rates with which adaptation by natural selection would be hard put to keep up. When such change occurs, the quality of your adaptation to your old habitat is irrelevant, and any competitive advantage you might have had may be eliminated at a stroke.

  Ian Tattersall

  Quality, Would Be, Habitat

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• The theory of evolution by natural selection is an ecological theory-founded on ecological observation by perhaps the greatest of all ecologists. It has been adopted by and brought up by the science of genetics, and ecologists, being modest people, are apt to forget their distinguished parenthood.

  John L. Harper

  Science, Theory Of Evolution, People

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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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• 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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• I and others on FIFA executive committee agreed to accept bribes in conjunction with selection of South Africa as host nation.

  Bryan Swanson

  Fifa, Host, Accepting

  Twitter post from Jun 03, 2015

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• Genetic algorithms (GAs) are defined as search procedures based on the mechanics of natural selection and genetics, and we think we know what innovation is - at least in some sort of qualitative way - but what does one have to do with the other?

  David Edward

  Thinking, Innovation, Way

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• Paleontologists [fossil experts] have paid an exorbitant price for Darwin's argument. We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life's history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we almost never see the very process we profess to study.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Views, Data, Fancy

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• Every writer is necessarily a critic - that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg - nine-tenths of him is under water.

  Thornton Wilder

  Skeletons, Water, Rejection

  Thornton Wilder, Jackson R. Bryer (1992). “Conversations with Thornton Wilder”, p.79, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• He will risk half his fortune in the stock market with less reflection that he devotes to the selection of a medium-priced automobile.

  Jesse Lauriston Livermore

  Reflection, Risk, Investing

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• One writes such a story [The Lord of the Rings] not out of the leaves of trees still to be observed, nor by means of botany and soil-science; but it grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mold of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps. No doubt there is much personal selection, as with a gardener: what one throws on one's personal compost-heap; and my mold is evidently made largely of linguistic matter.

  J. R. R. Tolkien

  Writing, Mean, Dark

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• In the most basic way, writers are defined not by the stories they tell, or their politics, or their gender, or their race, but by the words they use. Writing begins with language, and it is in that initial choosing, as one sifts through the wayward lushness of our wonderful mongrel English, that choice of vocabulary and grammar and tone, the selection on the palette, that determines who's sitting at that desk. Language creates the writer's attitude toward the particular story he's decided to tell.

  Donald E. Westlake

  Attitude, Writing, Vocabulary

  Donald E. Westlake (2014). “The Getaway Car: A Donald Westlake Nonfiction Miscellany”, p.28, University of Chicago Press

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• Even in dialogue, your own style rules your selection. Do not give yourself a blank check of this kind: 'I'll merely reproduce what I think a character like so-and-so would say.' You have to reproduce it in the way your literary premises dictate.

  Ayn Rand

  Writing, Character, Thinking

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• I believe that now and always the conscious selection of the best for reproduction will be impossible; that to propose it is to display a fundamental misunderstanding of what individuality implies. The way of nature has always been to slay the hindmost, and there is still no other way, unless we can prevent those who would become the hindmost being born. It is in the sterilization of failure, and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies.

  H. G. Wells

  Lying, Believe, Eugenics

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• The passion for playing chess is one of the most unaccountable in the world. It slaps the theory of natural selection in the face. It is the most absorbing of occupations. The least satisfying of desires. A nameless excrescence upon life. It annihilates a man. You have, let us say, a promising politician, a rising artist that you wish to destroy. Dagger or bomb are archaic and unreliable - but teach him, inoculate him with chess.

  H. G. Wells

  Passion, Artist, Men

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• The challenge for me has first been to see things as they are, whether a portrait, a city street, or a bouncing ball. In a word, I have tried to be objective. What I mean by objectivity is not the objectivity of a machine, but of a sensible human being with the mystery of personal selection at the heart of it. The second challenge has been to impose order onto the things seen and to supply the visual context and the intellectual framework - that to me is the art of photography.

  Berenice Abbott

  Photography, Art, Mean

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• Tapping melons with your knuckles is a good way of making your selection in the store, but apparently it's frowned upon at the strip club.

  Brad Wilkerson

  Sex, Clubs, Knuckles

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• Evolution works by selection, not by instruction. There is no final cause, no teleology, no purpose guiding the overall process

  Gerald Edelman

  Causes, Finals, Purpose

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• The possession of a quantity of plants, however good the plants may be themselves and however ample their number, does not make a garden; it only makes a collection. Having got the plants, the great thing is to use them with careful selection and definite intention.

  Gertrude Jekyll

  Garden, Numbers, Doe

  Gertrude Jekyll (1964). “On Gardening”

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• Your imagination is yours. You can remember the past you choose, rehearse the future you want, and identify with the real and fictional heroes and events of your selection.

  Roger Delano Hinkins

  Real, Hero, Past

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• Natural selection may lead to benefits for species, but these `higher' advantages can only arise as sequelae, or side consequences, of natural selection's causal mechanism: differential reproductive success of individuals.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  May, Sides, Benefits

  Stephen Jay Gould (1995). “Dinosaur in a haystack: reflections in natural history”, Harmony

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• All the shy people are doomed! Natural selection favors the loud and the aggressive

  Dylan Moran

  People, Shy, Favors

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