Natural Selection Quotes

Natural Selection Quote of the day

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.

Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

The expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient.

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.

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.

To suppose that the eye could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree

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

As natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection.

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

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.

Natural selection must be replaced by eugenical artificial selection. This idea constitutes the sound core of eugenics, the applied science of human betterment.

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.

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

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

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

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.

The principle of natural selection is absolutely incompatible with the word of God. [It] contradicts the revealed relations of creation to its Creator.

Nature's stern discipline enjoins mutual help at least as often as warfare. The fittest may also be the gentlest.

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

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

What are the chances that we will one day discover that DNA has absolutely nothing to do with inheritance? They are effectively zero.

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

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.

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.

Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

Natural selection is anything but random.

Natural selection is not evolution.

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.

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.

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.

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