Top 70 Evolution By Natural Selection Quotes
#1. 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
#2. Like many other natural wonders, the human mind is something of a bag of tricks, cobbled together over the eons by the foresightless process of evolution by natural selection.
Daniel C. Dennett
#3. 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
#4. Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is the only workable explanation that has ever been proposed for the remarkable fact of our own existence, indeed the existence of all life wherever it may turn up in the universe.
John Maynard Smith
#5. 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
#6. Suffering is a byproduct of evolution by natural selection, an inevitable consequence that may worry us in our more sympathetic moments but cannot be expected to worry a tiger - even if a tiger can be said to worry about anything at all - and certainly cannot be expected to worry its genes.
Richard Dawkins
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. Evolution is an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion during which the matter passes from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a definite coherent heterogeneity, and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation.
Herbert Spencer
#11. A totally blind process can by definition lead to anything; it can even lead to vision itself.
Jacques Monod
#12. Natural selection rendered evolution scientifically intelligible: it was this more than anything else which convinced professional biologists like Sir Joseph Hooker, T. H. Huxley and Ernst Haeckel.
Charles Darwin
#13. 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
#14. To suppose that the eye could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree
Charles Darwin
#16. In microbiology the roles of mutation and selection in evolution are coming to be better understood through the use of bacterial cultures of mutant strains.
Edward Tatum
#17. Indeed, not all attacks - especially the bitter and ridiculing kind leveled at Darwin - are offered in good faith, but for practical purposes it is good policy to assume that they are.
Hans Selye
#18. By the cold Darwinian logic of natural selection, evolution codifies happenstance into strategy.
David Quammen
#19. 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
#20. If artificial selection can make such major changes in so short a period of time, what must natural selection, working over billions of years, be capable of? The answer is all the beauty and diversity of the biological world. Evolution is a fact, not a theory.
Carl Sagan
#21. Things exist either because they have recently come into existence or because they have qualities that made them unlikely to be destroyed in the past.
Richard Dawkins
#22. The fact that natural selection and evolution crafted essentially carbon and water into a mechanism that can think and be conscious means there's nothing in physics that says you cannot do that to a greater degree.
Neill Blomkamp
#23. What marks the transition from non-sentient to sentient beings? A model of increasing complexity based on evolution through natural selection is simply a descriptive hypothesis, a kind of euphemism for "mystery," and not a satisfactory explanation.
Dalai Lama XIV
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. And specimens like this confirmed there had been some kind of divine rule in the universe because no natural selection process was up to the task of creating something like him. This was some god's, somewhere's, handiwork.
Nicole Williams
#27. Among the most important things to remember about evolution - and about its primary mechanism, natural selection, as limned by Darwin and his successors - is that it doesn't have purposes. It only has results. To
David Quammen
#28. Natural selection has served as a kind of intellectual sieve, producing brains and intelligences increasingly competent to deal with the laws of nature.
Carl Sagan
#29. 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
#30. This survival of the fittest implies multiplication of the fittest.
{The phrase 'survival of the fittest' was not originated by Charles Darwin, though he discussed Spencer's 'excellent expression' in a letter to Alfred Russel Wallace (Jul 1866).}
Herbert Spencer
#31. If theft is advantageous to everyone who succeeds at it, and adultery is a good strategy, at least for males, for increasing presence in the gene pool, why do we feel they are wrong? Shouldn't the only morality that evolution produces be the kind Bill Clinton had - being sorry you got caught?
Robert J. Sawyer
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. There was something built into the human brain by natural selection which was once useful, and which now manifests itself as religion.
Richard Dawkins
#36. [E]very major religion today is a winner in the Darwinian struggle waged among cultures, and none ever flourished by tolerating its rivals.
Edward O. Wilson
#37. Natural selection is a blind and undirected consequence of the interaction between variation and the environment. Natural selection exists only in the continuous present of the natural world: it has no memory of its previous actions, no plans for the future, or underlying purpose.
Henry Gee
#38. What are the chances that we will one day discover that DNA has absolutely nothing to do with inheritance? They are effectively zero.
Sam Harris
#39. The mechanism of natural selection depends on the survival, not of the strongest, nor the most intelligent, but of the most adaptable.
Julian Barnes
#40. Evolution, thus, is merely contingent on certain processes articulated by Darwin: variation and selection. No longer is a fixed object transformed, as in transformational evolution, but an entirely new start is, so to speak, made in every generation.
Ernst W. Mayr
#41. It is difficult to believe in the dreadful but quiet war lurking just below the serene facade of nature.
Charles Darwin
#42. Evolution has no long-term goal. There is no long-distance target, no final perfection to serve as a criterion for selection, although human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution.
Richard Dawkins
#43. That natural selection can produce changes within a type is disputed by no one, not even the staunchest creationist. But that it can transform one species into another - that, in fact, has never been observed.
Robert J. Sawyer
#44. The embryological record is almost always abbreviated in accordance with the tendency of nature (to be explained on the principle of survival of the fittest) to attain her needs by the easiest means.
Francis Maitland Balfour
#45. Pity thwarts the whole law of evolution, which is the law of natural selection. It preserves whatever is ripe for destruction;
Friedrich Nietzsche
#46. Natural selection is not an inflammatory phrase; evolution is.
Peter Agre
#47. 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
#48. Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability.
Ronald A. Fisher
#49. There is nothing ideal in Nature, because it was not created by some sort of ideal Almighty Being with perfect peerless craftsmanship. Nature as it is, has evolved through millions of years out of the biological drive for survival.
Abhijit Naskar
#50. One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.
Charles Darwin
#51. Our present intricate humanly consciousness evolved after a long journey of struggle. And the beauty of natural selection is that our struggle against nature made us worthy of being rewarded with the 3 lbs. lump of highly advanced biological computer by our Mother Nature herself.
Abhijit Naskar
#52. 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
#53. They say, you know, about evolution, it surely happened because their fossil record shows that. Look, my body and your body are miracles of design. Scientists are pretending they have the answer as how we got this way when natural selection couldn't possibly have produced such machines.
Kurt Vonnegut
#54. It looks as if the offspring have eyes so that they can see well (bad, teleological, backward causation), but that's an illusion. The offspring have eyes because their parents' eyes did see well (good, ordinary, forward causation).
Steven Pinker
#55. It is not always the magnitude of the differences observed between species that must determine specific distinctions, but the constant preservation of those differences in reproduction.
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
#56. Human social institutions can effect the course of human evolution. Just as climate, food supply, predators, and other natural forces of selection have molded our nature, so too can our culture.
Peter Singer
#57. 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
#58. Homosexuality is nature's way of keeping the population in check.
Abhijit Naskar
#59. 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
#60. We are moving from unconscious evolution through natural selection to conscious evolution by choice.
Barbara Marx Hubbard
#61. The secrets of evolution are death and time - the deaths of enormous numbers of lifeforms that were imperfectly adapted to the environment; and time for a long succession of small mutations.
Carl Sagan
#62. Nowhere was Darwin able to point to one bona fide case of natural selection having actually generated evolutionary change in nature ... Ultimately, the Darwinian theory of evolution is no more nor less than the great cosmogenic myth of the twentieth century.
Michael Denton
#63. It wasn't torpor that kept her - she was often restless to the point of irritability. She simply liked to feel that she was prevented from leaving, that she was needed.
Ian McEwan
#64. He who believes that each being has been created as we now see it, must occasionally have felt surprise when he has met with an animal having habits and structure not at all in agreement.
Charles Darwin
#65. 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
#66. There is no mechanism of selection in the history of ideas akin to that of the natural selection of genetic mutations in evolution
John Gray
#67. To understand Darwin's work, you have to distinguish between his theory of descent and his theory of natural selection. THe full name of the first is the theory of descent with modification. Some call it the fact of evolution, and some call it the doctrine of evolution.
Lee Spetner
#68. The facts of variability, of the struggle for existence, of adaptation to conditions, were notorious enough; but none of us had suspected that the road to the heart of the species problem lay through them, until Darwin and Wallace dispelled the darkness.
Thomas Henry Huxley
#69. Animals have genes for altruism, and those genes have been selected in the evolution of many creatures because of the advantage they confer for the continuing survival of the species.
Lewis Thomas
#70. The expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient.
Charles Darwin
