Selection Quotes - Page 7

• What does it say about a society that it devotes more care and patience to the selection of those who handle its money than of those who handle its children?

  Malcolm Gladwell

  Children, Doe, Care

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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 Selection was no longer something that was simply happening to me, but something I was actively a part of. I was an Elite.

  Kiera Cass

  Happenings, Elites

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• Wrong' training can be a very innocent thing. Consider a father who allows his child to read good books. That child may soon cease to watch television or go to the movies, nor will he eventually read Book-of-the-Month Club selections, because they are ludicrous and dull. As a young man, then, he will effectually be excluded from all of Madison Avenue and Hollywood and most of publishing, because what moves him or what he creates is quite irrelevant to what is going on: it is too fine. His father has brought him up as a dodo.

  Paul Goodman

  Children, Father, Moving

  Paul Goodman (2011). “Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society”, p.144, New York Review of Books

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• Nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things.

  Georgia O'Keeffe

  Real, Confusing, Details

  Georgia O'Keeffe, Jonathan Stuhlman, Barbara Buhler Lynes (2007). “Georgia O'Keeffe: Circling Around Abstraction”, p.22, Hudson Hills

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• History has to be rewritten because history is the selection of those threads of causes or antecedents that we are interested in.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

  History, Causes, Thread

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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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• One thing that makes the adventure of working in our field particularly rewarding, especially in attempting to improve the theory, is that... a chief criterion for the selection of a correct hypothesis... seems to be the criterion of beauty, simplicity, or elegance.

  Murray Gell-Mann

  Adventure, Science, Simplicity

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• Wisdom is meaningless until your own experience has given it meaning, and there is wisdom in the selection of wisdom.

  Bergen Evans

  Wisdom, Given, Meaningless

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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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• Speciation does not necessarily promote evolutionary change; rather, speciation 'gathers in' and guards evolutionary change by locking and stabilization for sufficient geological time within a Darwinian individual of the appropriate scale. If a change in a local population does not gain such protection, it becomes-to borrow Dawkins's metaphor at a macroevolutionary scale-a transient duststorm in the desert of time, a passing cloud without borders, integrity, or even the capacity to act as a unit of selection, in the panorama of life's phylogeny.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Life, Integrity, Clouds

  Stephen Jay GOULD, Stephen Jay Gould (2009). “Punctuated Equilibrium”, p.83, Harvard University Press

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• That there is much suffering in the world no one disputes. Which is more likely, that pain and evil are the result of an all-powerful and good God, or the product of uncaring natural forces? The presence of much suffering agrees well with the view that all organic beings have been developed through variation and natural selection.

  Charles Darwin

  Pain, Powerful, Views

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• You put three facts together - that all organisms produce more offspring that can survive, that there's variation among organisms, and that at least some of that variation is inherited - and the syllogistic inference is natural selection.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Together, Three, Variation

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Natural selection is just three factors - over-production, variation, and inheritance combined to produce adaptation to changing local environments. It's not a principle or progress; it's just a principle of local adaptation. You don't make better creatures in any cosmic sense; you make creatures that are better suited to the changing climates of their local habitats.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Progress, Climate, Principles

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• ... I feel the American public would be in a better position to exercise freedom of dietary choice if it were stated in bold print on the Goals and Food Selection pages that the value of dietary change remains controversial and that science cannot at this time insure that an altered diet will provide improved protection from certain killer diseases such as heart disease and cancer.

  Charles H. Percy

  Cancer, Heart, Exercise

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• The positive evidence for Darwinism is confined to small-scale evolutionary changes like insects developing insecticide resistance....Evidence like that for insecticide resistance confirms the Darwinian selection mechanism for small-scale changes, but hardly warrants the grand extrapolation that Darwinists want. It is a huge leap going from insects developing insecticide resistance via the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection and random variation to the very emergence of insects in the first place by that same mechanism.

  William A. Dembski

  Want, Resistance, Firsts

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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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• . . . by natural selection our mind has adapted itself to the conditions of the external world. It has adopted the geometry most advantageous to the species or, in other words, the most convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.

  Henri Poincare

  Math, Mind, World

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• DECALOGUE, n. A series of commandments, ten in number - just enough to permit an intelligent selection for observance, but not enough to embarrass the choice.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Intelligent, Numbers, Justice

  Ambrose Bierce (2016). “The Devil's Dictionary: The Devil World”, p.41, 谷月社

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• We are embedded in the great evolutionary story of planet Earth, the spare, elegant process of mutation and selection and bricolage. And this means that we are anything but alone.

  Ursula Goodenough

  Mean, Stories, Earth

  Ursula Goodenough (2000). “The Sacred Depths of Nature”, p.75, Oxford University Press, USA

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• The basic formulation, or bare-bones mechanics, of natural selection is a disarmingly simple argument, based on three undeniable facts (overproduction of offspring, variation, and heritability) and one syllogistic inference (natural selection, or the claim that organisms enjoying differential reproductive success will, on average, be those variants that are fortuitously better adapted to changing local environments, and that these variants will then pass their favored traits to offspring by inheritance).

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Simple, Average, Atheism

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• Comic book readers are just as abandoned by the corporate system as the creators, despite the importance supposedly given their hard-earned dollars. The average comics shop can offer only a tiny fraction of an industrywide selection that is itself extremely limited in scope. And even when readers know exactly what they want, the search can be maddeningly futile.

  Scott McCloud

  Book, Average, Dollars

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• Monotheism is the primitive religion which centers human consciousness on Hive Authority. There is One God and His Name is _______ (substitute Hive-Label). If there is only One God then there is no choice, no option, no selection of reality. There is only Submission or Heresy. The word Islam means "submission". The basic posture of Christianity is kneeling. Thy will be done.

  Timothy Leary

  Mean, Reality, Names

  "The Intelligence Agents". Book by Timothy Leary, 1979.

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• If I were to give a prize for the single best idea anybody ever had, I'd give it to Darwin for the idea of natural selection - ahead of Newton, ahead of Einstein - because his idea unites the two most disparate features of our universe: the world of purposeless, meaningless matter and motion, particles jostling on the one side, and the world of meaning and purpose, design on the other.

  Daniel Dennett

  Ideas, Two, Giving

  "Big Thinkers on Evolution". NOVA-PBS, www.pbs.org. October 6, 2009.

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• Every cell is a triumph of natural selection, and we’re made of trillions of cells. Within us, is a little universe.

  Carl Sagan

  Cells, Triumph, Littles

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