Best Natural Selection Quotes

A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.

Sympathy will have been increased through natural selection.

Mutation is random; natural selection is the very opposite of random.

Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal.

The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic.

We have seen that in certain respects operant reinforcement resembles the natural selection of evolutionary theory. Just as genetic characteristics which arise as mutations are selected or discarded by their consequences, so novel forms of behavior are selected or discarded through reinforcement.

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?

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

Societies would _not_ be better off if everyone were like Mr Spock, all rationality and no emotion. Instead, a balance – a teaming up of the internal rivals – is optimal for brains. … Some balance of the emotional and rational systems is needed, and that balance may already be optimized by natural selection in human brains.

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?

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.

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.

Truly, this earth is a trophy cup for the industrious man. And this rightly so, in the service of natural selection. He who does not possess the force to secure his Lebensraum in this world, and, if necessary, to enlarge it, does not deserve to possess the necessities of life. He must step aside and allow stronger peoples to pass him by.

There is economics in biology, nothing is free, everything has to be paid for, there are costs as well as benefits to everything in life, for example, there was never sufficient natural selection pressure to develop better eyes, individuals could earn other things like smiley smiles rather than waste energy & time on better eyes.

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.

In true natural selection, if a body has what it takes to survive, its genes automatically survive because they are inside it. So the genes that survive tend to be, automatically, those genes that confer on bodies the qualities that assist them to survive.

Natural selection is all about the differential success of rival DNA in getting itself transmitted vertically in the species archives.

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.

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.

It is good to keep in mind … that nobody has ever succeeded in producing even one new species by the accumulation of micromutations. Darwin’s theory of natural selection has never had any proof, yet it has been universally accepted.

We should learn to understand natural selection, so that we can oppose any tendency to apply it to human politics.

Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability.

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.

Blindness to suffering is an inherent consequence of natural selection. Nature is neither kind nor cruel but indifferent.

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.

Natural selection is not evolution.

Natural selection is anything but random.

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.

Natural selection involves no plan, no goal, and no direction — just genes increasing and decreasing in frequency depending on whether individuals with those genes have, relative to other individuals, greater or lesser reproductive success.

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.

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.

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.

If it takes several billion years to develop the building blocks which you need, like RNA and DNA, and then those can build multicellular life and then multicellular life can be honed with natural selection to a point where it becomes sentient like us, then at some point that sentient being can begin to manipulate the matter around it to build better sentient life.

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

Darwin’s idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition.