Quotes About Natural Selection

#1. This preservation of favourable individual differences and variations, and the destruction of those which are injurious, I have called Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest.

Charles Darwin

#2. A deep understanding of Darwinism teaches us to be wary of the easy assumption that design is the only alternative to chance

Richard Dawkins

#3. It is difficult to believe in the dreadful but quiet war lurking just below the serene facade of nature.

Charles Darwin

#4. For me, the level at which natural selection causes the phenomenon of adaptation is the level of the replicator - the gene.

Richard Dawkins

#5. The fact that we humans are indeed omnivorous is deeply inscribed in our bodies, which natural selection has equipped to handle a remarkably wide-ranging diet.

Michael Pollan

#6. Darwinists are right to say that selection favours the organisms that leave alive the most progeny, but vigorous growth takes place within a constrained space where feedback from the environment allows the emergence of natural self-regulation.

James E. Lovelock

#7. The men may also not have known that their notions of beauty and feelings of attraction are deeply hardwired, steered in the right direction by programs carved by millions of years of natural selection.

David Eagleman

#8. in view of the law of natural selection it was agreed that a nation or world of people who will not use their intelligence are no better than animals who do not have intelligence. Such people are beasts of burden and steaks on the table by choice and consent.

Milton William Cooper

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

Richard Dawkins

#10. I would give absolutely nothing for the theory of Natural Selection, if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent.

Charles Darwin

#11. If the evolutionary mechanism of natural selection depends on death, destruction, and violence of the strong against the weak, then these things are perfectly natural. On what basis, then, does the atheist judge the natural world to be horribly wrong, unfair, and unjust?

Timothy Keller

#12. 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

#13. Sexual selection acts in a less rigorous manner than natural selection. The latter produces its effects by the life or death at all ages of the more or less successful individuals.

Charles Darwin

#14. It is a shock to us in the twentieth century to discover, from observations science has made, that the fundamental mechanisms of life cannot be ascribed to natural selection, and therefore were designed. But we must deal with our shock as best we can and go on.

Michael Behe

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. If natural selection can create creationists it can manage a caterpillar with a face on its arse.

Zane Stumpo

#19. 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

#20. It is natural selection that gives direction to changes, orients chance, and slowly, progressively produces more complex structures, new organs, and new species. Novelties come from previously unseen association of old material. To create is to recombine.

Francois Jacob

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. One is that you legislate according to natural selection, the other is that you don't. You have compassion, you try and help people. It's a fundamental clash between two people who happen to love each other, which complicates everything.

Bill Nighy

#24. 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

#25. Natural selection is almost always handled in general temps . This means that it has no explanatory power when specific problems arise.

Norman Macbeth

#26. But Natural Selection, as we shall hereafter see, is a power incessantly ready for action, and is immeasurably superior to man's feeble efforts, as the works of Nature are to those of Art.

Charles Darwin

#27. Ideas percolate. Through natural selection, the best ones survive.

Andrew Lo

#28. 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

#29. The forces which are working out the great scheme of perfect happiness, taking no account of incidental suffering, exterminate such sections of mankind as stand in their way, with the same sternness that they exterminate beasts of prey and herds of useless ruminants.

Herbert Spencer

#30. If I hope to survive, I have to acknowledge the natural selection that goes on when film stocks and cameras are eliminated from the world. And film viewers won't want to watch the same thing over and over again from me.

Guy Maddin

#31. 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

#32. Pity thwarts the whole law of evolution, which is the law of natural selection. It preserves whatever is ripe for destruction;

Friedrich Nietzsche

#33. 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

#34. 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.

Richard Goldschmidt

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

Richard Dawkins

#36. Natural selection is not an inflammatory phrase; evolution is.

Peter Agre

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. 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

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

Ronald A. Fisher

#42. 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

#43. One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.

Charles Darwin

#44. 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

#45. Natural selection is anything but random.

Richard Dawkins

#46. 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

#47. Nevertheless so profound is our ignorance, and so high our presumption, that we marvel when we hear of the extinction of an organic being; and as we do not see the cause, we invoke cataclysms to desolate the world, or invent laws on the duration of the forms of life!

Charles Darwin

#48. 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

#49. We no longer have natural selection. We have unnatural selection. Survival of the fittest has been replaced by survival of the fakest.

Maureen Dowd

#50. It is not enough to be able to think that if there are logical truths, natural selection might very well have given me the capacity to recognize them. That cannot be my ground for trusting my reason, because even that thought implicitly relies on reason in a prior way.

Thomas Nagel

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. 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

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. Natural selection is a pretty efficient process, so if a behavior is found widely in humans and other species, it's a better starting guess to presume it is adaptive rather than to assume it's merely dumb.

Anonymous

#57. 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

#58. Humanity is experiencing an extraordinary burst of evolutionary change, driven by good old-fashioned Darwinian natural selection. But it is selection among ideas, not among genes.

Matt Ridley

#59. 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

#60. As Charles Darwin once wrote, a tribe with many people acting like givers, who "were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection.

Adam M. Grant

#61. 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

#62. 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

#63. 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

#64. Druids always pick the hard way; it encourages natural selection.

Rich Burlew

#65. 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

#66. It's the pattern that matters, you see. Not the choice of building materials. Life is information, shaped by natural selection. Carbon's just fashion, nucleic acids mere optional accessories. Electrons can do all that stuff, if they're coded the right way. It's all just pattern.

Peter Watts

#67. 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.

Randolph M. Nesse

#68. The survival or preservation of certain favoured words in the struggle for existence is natural selection.

Charles Darwin

#69. 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

#70. 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

#71. 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

#72. 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

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

Carl Sagan

#74. 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.

B.F. Skinner

#75. Sexual selection will also be largely dominated by natural selection tending towards the general welfare of the species.

Charles Darwin

#76. We must start by recognizing that the human mind was not designed for happiness. It was designed by natural selection to facilitate the survival and reproduction of human beings in an environment that existed tens of thousands of years ago. We know this because we know how natural selection works.

Chris Wilson

#77. All that anybody has in the way of a reputation anymore is an odor which, from birth to death, cannot be modified. People are who they are, and that is that. The Law of Natural Selection has made human beings absolutely honest in that regard. Everybody is exactly what he or she seems to be.

Kurt Vonnegut

#78. 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

#79. When I see the moon on a clear night, I do say "blessed be" and I remind myself to be grateful to the universe that I happen to exist in such a lovely and wondrous world, even and especially as I can rattle on about magma cooling, abiogenesis, and natural selection.

Thomm Quackenbush

#80. The Galapagos Islands are probably the most famous wildlife-watching destination in the world. And no wonder - it's almost impossible to exaggerate the sheer spectacle of the place that provided inspiration for Charles Darwin's ground-breaking theory of natural selection.

Mark Carwardine

#81. Homosexuality is nature's way of keeping the population in check.

Abhijit Naskar

#82. 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.

Phillip E. Johnson

#83. 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

#84. 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

#85. 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

#86. I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection.

Charles Darwin

#87. All sentient beings developed through natural selection in such a way that pleasant sensations serve as their guide, and especially the pleasure derived from sociability and from loving our families. - Charles Darwin

Rick Hanson

#88. 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

#89. We are the one creature to whom natural selection has bequeathed a brain complex enough to comprehend the laws that govern the universe. And we should be proud that we are the only species that has figured how we came to be.

Jerry A. Coyne

#90. Biology is run by intricate cellular mechanisms. Cellular mechanisms are run by Nature. Thus, the more we attempt to understand Nature, the more we get closer to our existential properties.

Abhijit Naskar

#91. We are moving from unconscious evolution through natural selection to conscious evolution by choice.

Barbara Marx Hubbard

#92. 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

#93. 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

#94. 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

#95. 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

#96. 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

#97. As the brain and body were shaped by natural selection, consumer goods adapted to the mind through a parallel process of product selection, which has rendered them ever more fluent, expressive, and fascinating to our senses.

David B. Givens

#98. Nothing drives progress like the imagination. The idea precedes the deed. The only exceptions are accidents and natural selection.

Theodore Levitt

#99. 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

#100. Since natural selection requires a function to select, an irreducibly complex biological system, if there is such a thing, would have to arise as an integrated unit for natural selection to have anything to act on.

Michael Behe