Natural Selection quotes:

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I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection. -- Charles Darwin
Natural selection is not evolution. -- Ronald Fisher
Natural selection is anything but random. -- Richard Dawkins
Darwin's idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition. -- Daniel Dennett
Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous. -- Barbara Ehrenreich
I would give absolutely nothing for the theory of Natural Selection, if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent. -- Charles Darwin
Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection determined the evolution of cultures in the same manner as it did that of species. -- Konrad Lorenz
The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity. -- Richard Dawkins
It is essential for genetic material to be able to make exact copies of itself; otherwise growth would produce disorder, life could not originate, and favourable forms would not be perpetuated by natural selection. -- Maurice Wilkins
We may consequently state the fundamental theorem of Natural Selection in the form: The rate of increase in fitness of any organism at any time is equal to its genetic variance in fitness at that time. -- Ronald Fisher
Although much remains obscure, and will long remain obscure, ... I am convinced that Natural Selection has been the main but not exclusive means of modification. -- Charles Darwin
I think it can be shown that there is such an unerring power at work in Natural Selection, which selects exclusively for the good of each organic being. -- Charles Darwin
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
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
This fundamental subject of Natural Selection will be treated at some length in the fourth chapter; and we shall then see how Natural Selection almost inevitably causes much Extinction of the less improved forms of life and induces what I have called Divergence of Character. -- Charles Darwin
Life on Earth is not the result of a series of miracles performed by a supernatural god-creator, and it is definitely not a product of matter having a mind of its own, of an equally miraculous evolutionary process supervised by Lady Natural Selection who would turn rabbits into lions. -- Paul Greene
Natural Selection is not Evolution. Yet, ever since the two words have been in common use, the theory of Natural Selection has been employed as a convenient abbreviation for the theory of Evolution by means of Natural Selection, put forward by Darwin and Wallace. This has had the unfortunate consequence that the theory of Natural Selection itself has scarcely ever, if ever, received separate consideration. -- Ronald Fisher
Natural selection will not remove ignorance from future generations. -- Richard Dawkins
Multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die. -- Charles Darwin
Natural selection eliminates and maybe maintains, but it doesn't create. -- Lynn Margulis
Mutation is random; natural selection is the very opposite of random. -- Richard Dawkins
Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability. -- Ronald Fisher
We have decommissioned natural selection and must now look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become. -- E. O. Wilson
As Darwin himself was at pains to point out, natural selection is all about differential survival within species, not between them. -- Richard Dawkins
In a knowledge economy, natural selection favors organizations that can most effectively harness and coordinate collective intellectual energy and creative capacity. -- Justin Rosenstein
For me, the level at which natural selection causes the phenomenon of adaptation is the level of the replicator - the gene. -- Richard Dawkins
If there are other worlds elsewhere in the universe, I would conjecture they are governed by the same laws of natural selection. -- Richard Dawkins
To suppose that the eye could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree -- Charles Darwin
Natural selection is not gene centrist and nor is biology all about genes; our comprehending minds are a result of our fast evolving culture. -- Daniel Dennett
The real problem with natural selection is that it makes no intuitive sense. It is like quantum physics; we may intellectually grasp it, but it will never feel right to us. -- Paul Bloom
Whether you like it or not, the digital age has produced a new format for modern romance, and natural selection may be favoring the quick-thumbed quip peddler over the confident, ice-breaking alpha male. -- Ashton Kutcher
Each of you possesses the most powerful, dangerous and subversive trait that natural selection has ever devised. It's a piece of neural audio technology for rewiring other people's minds. I'm talking about your language. -- Mark Pagel
The essence of Darwinism lies in its claim that natural selection creates the fit. Variation is ubiquitous and random in direction. It supplies raw material only. Natural selection directs the course of evolutionary change. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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
This survival of the fittest which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr. Darwin has called "natural selection", or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life. -- Herbert Spencer
My own field of paleontology has strongly challenged the Darwinian premise that life's major transformations can be explained by adding up, through the immensity of geological time, the successive tiny changes produced generation after generation by natural selection. -- Stephen Jay Gould
Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can only be a proximate explanation. A plane or a car is explained by a designer but that's because the designer himself, the engineer, is explained by natural selection. -- Richard Dawkins
Why do people believe that there are dangerous implications of the idea that the mind is a product of the brain, that the brain is organized in part by the genome, and that the genome was shaped by natural selection? -- Steven Pinker
The human brain is a product of natural selection. In the face of scarcity, our hominid great-great-uncles were unable to compete against our sapient great-great-grandparents' abilities to build more elaborate mental models and orchestrate their bodies' movements in more sophisticated ways. -- Justin Rosenstein
I think it inevitably follows, that as new species in the course of time are formed through natural selection, others will become rarer and rarer, and finally extinct. The forms which stand in closest competition with those undergoing modification and improvement will naturally suffer most. -- Charles Darwin
There are good reasons why natural selection has become widely accepted as an explanation of evolutionary development. When applied to mammals and other large animals, it fits perfectly. But we cannot assume that all evolutionary steps arise from selection, particularly when looking at smaller animals. -- John Tyler Bonner
Once you have speech, you don't have to wait for natural selection! If you want more strength, you build a stealth bomber; if you don't like bacteria, you invent penicillin; if you want to communicate faster, you invent the Internet. Once speech evolved, all of human life changed. -- Tom Wolfe
Natural selection shaped the human brain to be drawn toward aspects of nature that enhance our survival and reproduction, like verdant landscapes and docile creatures. There is no payoff to getting the warm fuzzies in the presence of rats, snakes, mosquitoes, cockroaches, herpes simplex and the rabies virus. -- Paul Bloom
My eyes are constantly wide open to the extraordinary fact of existence. Not just human existence, but the existence of life and how this breathtakingly powerful process, which is natural selection, has managed to take the very simple facts of physics and chemistry and build them up to redwood trees and humans. -- Richard Dawkins
Professor Eddington has recently remarked that 'The law that entropy always increases the second law of thermodynamics holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of nature'. It is not a little instructive that so similar a law [the fundamental theorem of natural selection] should hold the supreme position among the biological sciences. -- Ronald Fisher
It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, wherever and whenever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life. -- Charles Darwin
Sympathy will have been increased through natural selection -- Charles Darwin
Ideas percolate. Through natural selection, the best ones survive. -- Andrew Lo
Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability. -- Ronald Fisher
By the cold Darwinian logic of natural selection, evolution codifies happenstance into strategy. -- David Quammen
Is there a better example of natural selection in action than 'Project Runway?' -- Jamais Cascio
All the shy people are doomed! Natural selection favors the loud and the aggressive -- Dylan Moran
We are moving from unconscious evolution through natural selection to conscious evolution by choice. -- Barbara Marx Hubbard
The survival or preservation of certain favoured words in the struggle for existence is natural selection. -- Charles Darwin
Blindness to suffering is an inherent consequence of natural selection. Nature is neither kind nor cruel but indifferent. -- Richard Dawkins
Nothing drives progress like the imagination. The idea precedes the deed. The only exceptions are accidents and natural selection. -- Theodore Levitt
We should learn to understand natural selection, so that we can oppose any tendency to apply it to human politics. -- Richard Dawkins
Natural selection is all about the differential success of rival DNA in getting itself transmitted vertically in the species archives. -- Richard Dawkins
Natural selection is a theory of local adaptation to changing environments. It proposes no perfecting principles, no guarantee of general improvement -- Stephen Jay Gould
Natural selection is almost always handled in general temps . . This means that it has no explanatory power when specific problems arise. -- Norman Macbeth
The mechanism of natural selection depends on the survival, not of the strongest, nor the most intelligent, but of the most adaptable. -- Julian Barnes
There was something built into the human brain by natural selection which was once useful, and which now manifests itself as religion. -- Richard Dawkins
It is hard to explain the huge variety of diatoms - a microorganism that has 100,000 species - in terms of natural selection. -- John Tyler Bonner
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...we must be wary of granting too much power to natural selection by viewing all basic capacities of our brain as direct adaptations. -- Stephen Jay Gould
Natural selection must be replaced by eugenical artificial selection. This idea constitutes the sound core of eugenics, the applied science of human betterment. -- Theodosius Dobzhansky
The principle of natural selection is absolutely incompatible with the word of God. [It] contradicts the revealed relations of creation to its Creator. -- Samuel Wilberforce
Natural selection is not the only process that changes organisms over time. But is the only process that seemingly designs organisms over time. -- Steven Pinker
As natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection. -- Charles Darwin
Today Charles Darwin is best known for establishing the fact of evolution and for recognizing the major role of natural selection in driving it. -- Jared Diamond
Natural selection has ensured that each species achieves the requisite effect somehow, but it doesn't care, so to speak, how the trick is done. -- David Papineau
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
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
The difficulty of looking at a system like natural selection if you have any sort of moral sense yourself, is almost what makes it beautiful. -- Paul Bettany
Natural selection acts solely by accumulating slight successive favorable variations, it can produce no great or sudden modification; it can act only by very short steps. -- Charles Darwin
Of course, there is no reconciliation between the theory of evolution by natural selection and the traditional religious view of the origin of the human mind. -- E. O. Wilson
I see humanity now as one vast plant, needing for its highest fulfillment only love, the natural blessings of the great outdoors, and intelligent crossing and selection. -- Luther Burbank
Oxygen flooded into the atmosphere as a pollutant, even a poison, until natural selection shaped living things to thrive on the stuff and, indeed, suffocate without it. -- Richard Dawkins
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
Natural selection is not the wind which propels the vessel, but the rudder which, by friction, now on this side and now on that, shapes the course. -- Asa Gray
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. -- Thomas Nagel
With highly civilised nations continued progress depends in a subordinate degree on natural selection; for such nations do not supplant and exterminate one another as do savage tribes. -- Charles Darwin
Design in nature is but a concatenation of accidents, culled by natural selection until the result is so beautiful or effective as to seem a miracle of purpose. -- Michael Pollan
Thus the genetic basis to the origin of bird species is to be sought in the inheritance of adult traits that are subject to natural and sexual selection. -- Peter R. Grant
Ethics, like natural selection, make existence possible. Aesthetics, like sensual selection, make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and change. -- Oscar Wilde
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
Evolution by natural selection is not an idle hypothesis. The genetic variation on which selection acts is well understood in principle all the way down to the molecular level. -- E. O. Wilson
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
Multiculturalism destroys the true diversity which nature requires for the continued evolution of the species through the natural selection process of differentiation and competition between specialized populations within a group. -- Billy Roper
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
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
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
The man that created the theory of evolution by natural selection was thrown out by his Dad because he wanted him to be a doctor. GAWD, parents haven't changed much. -- Charles Darwin
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
But of course, what the eagle does not realize is that it is participating in a very crude form of natural selection.One day a tortoise will learn how to fly. -- Terry Pratchett
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
Just as the design of our bodies can be understood only in terms of natural selection, so the design of our minds can be understood only in terms of memetic selection. -- Susan Blackmore
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
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
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
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
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
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
If I were not an atheist, I think I would have to be a Catholic because if it wasn't the forces of natural selection that designed fish, It must have been an Italian. -- Douglas Adams
I am quite sure that our views on evolution would be very different had biologists studied genetics and natural selection before and not after most of them were convinced that evolution had occurred. -- John B. S. Haldane
I am quite sure that our views on evolution would be very different had biologists studied genetics and natural selection before and not after most of them were convinced that evolution had occurred. -- John B. S. Haldane
What had been released into the desert vacuum and starry oases of the galaxy was the inexorable logic of reproduction and natural selection. What followed was parasitism, predation, symbiosis, interdependency chaos, complexity, life. -- Robert Charles Wilson
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
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
Darwinian natural selection only yields adaptation to changing local environments, and better function in an immediate habitat might just as well be achieved by greater simplicity in form and behavior as by ever-increasing complexity. -- Stephen Jay Gould
The process of editing a piece of writing seems sometimes a lot like natural selection. Your efforts never really eliminate the mistakes. You just cause them to evolve into a sneakier, more robust breed. -- John A. Ashley
Technology is the means by which we have decommissioned natural selection and are seizing control. We are no longer to be victims of some blind evolutionary process where sentient beings are massacred by entropy. -- Jason Silva
If I want to keep making films for a few more years, I probably should be willing to adapt. I've sort of evolved into the filmmaker that I am because of natural selection anyway. -- Guy Maddin
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
It was a shock to people of the nineteenth century when they discovered, from observations science had made, that many features of the biological world could be ascribed to the elegant principle of natural selection. -- Michael Behe
We live in a cultural milieu ... The idea that culture is our ecological niche is still applicable. The impact and force of natural selection on the human physique are conditioned by the dimensions of culture. -- C. Loring Brace
This survival of the fittest which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr. Darwin has called 'natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life. -- Herbert Spencer
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anyone who writes about "Darwin's theory of evolutionin the singular, without segregating the theories of gradual evolution, common descent, speciation, and the mechanism of natural selection, will be quite unable to discuss the subject competently. -- Ernst Mayr
Natural selection based on the differential multiplication of variant types cannot exist before there is material capable of replicating itself and its own variations, that is, before the origination of specifically genetic material or gene-material. -- Hermann Joseph Muller

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