Top 100 Quotes About Natural Selection
#1. For me, the level at which natural selection causes the phenomenon of adaptation is the level of the replicator - the gene.
Richard Dawkins
#2. Sympathy will have been increased through natural selection
Charles Darwin
#3. 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
#4. Since many traits can affect an individual's adaptation to it's environment (it's "fitness") natural selection can over eons sculpt an animal or plant into something that looks designed
Jerry A. Coyne
#5. The mechanism of natural selection depends on the survival, not of the strongest, nor the most intelligent, but of the most adaptable.
Julian Barnes
#6. For forms existing in larger numbers will always have a better chance, within any given period, of presenting further favourable variations for natural selection to seize on, than will the rarer forms which exist in lesser numbers.
Charles Darwin
#7. We've become a nation of Frankensteins, and our monster is us. With everyone working so hard at altering their facades, we no longer have natural selection. We have unnatural selection.
Maureen Dowd
#8. 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, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being.
Richard Dawkins
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. There was something built into the human brain by natural selection which was once useful, and which now manifests itself as religion.
Richard Dawkins
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. I wouldn't be a very good hunter without these glasses. I'm not a very good hunter with these glasses, but I'd be even worse without them, so that would put a crimp in how many kids I could have, so all of these medical advances have at least in some parts of the world blunted natural selection.
Carl Zimmer
#18. Smoking will probably kill me, but so will natural selection.
Carroll Bryant
#19. If there are other worlds elsewhere in the universe, I would conjecture they are governed by the same laws of natural selection.
Richard Dawkins
#20. 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
#21. Not every good idea survives. Not every new form of art is repeated. Not every new potential instinct is successful. Only the successful ones get repeated. By natural selection and then through repetition they become probable, more habitual.
Rupert Sheldrake
#22. 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
#23. Sensual pleasures are the whip natural selection uses to control us, to keep us in the thrall of its warped values system.
Robert Wright
#24. 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
#25. Admonished for his lack of familiarity with twentieth century science, Sundar Singh said, 'What is science?' 'Natural selection and survival of the fittest,' he was told. 'Ah,' Sundar Singh replied, 'but I am more interested in divine selection and the survival of the unfit.
Sadhu Sundar Singh
#26. 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
#27. Behavioral genetics confirms that aggressive tendencies can be inherited, and that gives natural selection material to work with in shifting the average violent tendencies of a population.
Steven Pinker
#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. We have stopped natural selection from purifying the species because deep in our heart of hearts, we are all terrified that we won't make the cut.
Moxie Mezcal
#30. Why not? It's natural selection. Just like nature." I wrinkled my nose. "Boudas love this argument, because it gives them an excuse to do all the wrong things. 'I'm sorry I screwed your sister and got my penis stuck in your German shepherd. It's in my nature. I just couldn't help myself.
Ilona Andrews
#31. 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
#32. All the shy people are doomed! Natural selection favors the loud and the aggressive
Dylan Moran
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. Natural selection will not remove ignorance from future generations.
Richard Dawkins
#38. As Darwin himself was at pains to point out, natural selection is all about differential survival within species, not between them.
Richard Dawkins
#39. Natural selection is not a master engineer, but a tinkerer. It doesn't produce the absolute perfection achievable by a designer starting from scratch, but merely the best it can do with what is has to work with.
Jerry A. Coyne
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. Natural selection is a theory of local adaptation to changing environments. It proposes no perfecting principles, no guarantee of general improvement
Stephen Jay Gould
#43. From those humble beginnings we learned to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favors the paranoid.
Peter Watts
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. This is natural selection, plain as day: the islanders have a simple rule: if it returns from the sea intact, copy it! They may have considerable comprehension of the principles of naval architecture that retrospectively endorse their favorite designs, but it is strictly unnecessary.
Daniel C. Dennett
#47. In the case of living machinery, the 'designer' is unconscious natural selection, the blind watchmaker.
Richard Dawkins
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. The man's a born straggler, Honey thought, another lucky exception to the rules of natural selection. A million years ago he would've been an easy snack for a saber-toothed tiger.
Carl Hiaasen
#51. 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
#52. In a knowledge economy, natural selection favors organizations that can most effectively harness and coordinate collective intellectual energy and creative capacity.
Justin Rosenstein
#53. 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
#54. Darwin's idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition.
Daniel Dennett
#55. Is there a better example of natural selection in action than 'Project Runway?'
Jamais Cascio
#56. 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.
Richard Dawkins
#57. To suppose that the eye could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree
Charles Darwin
#58. 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
#60. Heavy Metal fans are buying Heavy Metal records, taking the records home, listening to the records and then blowing their heads off with shotguns? Where's the problem? That's an unemployment solution right there, folks! It's called natural selection.
Denis Leary
#61. I am convinced that natural selection has been the main but not exclusive means of modification.
Charles Darwin
#62. 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
#63. Natural selection has duped us with an emotion that encourages group thinking. It is an emotion that makes us act as if for the good of the group; an emotion that brings pleasure, pride, or even thrills from coordinated group activity.
Mark Pagel
#64. By the cold Darwinian logic of natural selection, evolution codifies happenstance into strategy.
David Quammen
#65. It comes from natural selection: the process which, as far as we know, is the only process ultimately capable of generating complexity out of simplicity.
Richard Dawkins
#66. We have decommissioned natural selection and must now look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become.
E. O. Wilson
#67. Natural selection awards no prize for second place.
Thomas Lewis
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. Our consciousness is also raised by the cruelty and wastefulness of natural selection. Predators seem beautifully 'designed' to catch prey animals, while the prey animals seem equally beautifully 'designed' to escape them. Whose side is God on?
Richard Dawkins
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. And yet, strange to say, now that the truth [of natural selection] is recognized by most cultivated people ... now more than ever, in the history of the world, are they doing all they can to further the survival of the unfittest.
Herbert Spencer
#81. 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
#82. This preservation of favourable variations and the rejection of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection.
Charles Darwin
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. The right to live does not connote the right of each man to reproduce his kind ... As we lessen the stringency of natural selection, and more and more of the weaklings and the unfit survive, we must increase the standard, mental and physical, of parentage.
Karl Pearson
#88. Darwin called such a process artificial, as opposed to natural, selection, but from the flower's point of view, this is a distinction without a difference: individual plants in which a trait desired by either bees or Turks occurred wound up with more offspring.
Michael Pollan
#89. 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
#90. Natural selection is all about the differential success of rival DNA in getting itself transmitted vertically in the species archives.
Richard Dawkins
#91. 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
#92. Zoocentrism is the primary fallacy of human sociobiology, for this view of human behavior rests on the argument that if the actions of "lower" animals with simple nervous systems arise as genetic products of natural selection, then human behavior should have a similar basis.
Stephen Jay Gould
#93. Since all organisms vary, and all reproduce themselves in greater numbers than can survive, there must always be competition between variants; in other words, the principle of natural selection, too, is universally applicable.
Charles Darwin
#94. The origin of the human condition is best explained by the natural selection for social interaction - the inherited propensities to communicate, recognize, evaluate, bond, cooperate, compete, and from all these the deep warm pleasure of belonging to your own special group.
Edward O. Wilson
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. Natural selection is not an inflammatory phrase; evolution is.
Peter Agre
#99. 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
#100. Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability.
Ronald A. Fisher
