The Selection Quotes
Nothing drives progress like the imagination. The idea precedes the deed. The only exceptions are accidents and natural selection.
The role of a museum of modern art is to make a good selection and identify what we believe to be the coming movements, and that requires taste.
Wisdom is meaningless until your own experience has given it meaning, and there is wisdom in the selection of wisdom.
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.
I have a big collection of quotation programs...In particular, I like MCR Software's Wisdom of the Ages, which has the best selection of relevant quotes I know.
Ratings agencies are highly conflicted, unimaginative dupes. They are blissfully unaware of adverse selection and moral hazard. Investors should never trust them.
Unless a variety of opinions are laid before us, we have no opportunity of selection, but are bound of necessity to adopt the particular view which may have been brought forward.
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.
History is so indifferently rich, that a case for almost any conclusion from it can be made by a selection of instances.
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.
By the cold Darwinian logic of natural selection, evolution codifies happenstance into strategy.
Evolution thus is merely contingent on certain processes articulated by Darwin: variation and selection.
Whatever laudable qualities the English may possess in their selection, preparation, and consumption of food, elegance, originality, diversity, and imagination are not among them.
High finance isn't burglary or obtaining money by false pretenses, but rather a judicious selection from the best features of those fine arts.
Some of you read with me 40 years ago a portion of Aristotle's Ethics, a selection of passages that describe his idea of happiness. You may not remember too well.
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.
Everything has a reason, including the selection of the photos, which was not arbitrary but appropriate to the period, its highs and lows and my sense of them.
You may know more about vintage wine than the wine steward, but if you're smart you'll let your man do the choosing and be ecstatic over his selection, even if it tastes like shampoo.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In 2010, my two Harvard mathematician colleagues and I dismantled kin-selection theory, which was the reigning theory of the origin of altruism at the time.
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.
Humans didn't really fight over skin tone or ideology; those were just handy cues for kin-selection purposes. Ultimately it always came down to bloodlines and limited resources.
You just click and you get 18,000 screen shots on how to apply lipstick, for example, but there will be the same selection that has taken place in paper in digital, too.
In the survival of favoured individuals and races, during the constantly-recurring struggle for existence, we see a powerful and ever-acting form of selection.
The survival or preservation of certain favoured words in the struggle for existence is natural selection.
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.
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.
Memory is... similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.
Just remember we're now in selection. Every piece, every erg, every seat race-they're all recorded, and I notice things
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.
It is well to open one's mind but only as a preliminary to closing it ... for the supreme act of judgment and selection.
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.
Jury selection is strictly an emotional process. They're looking for people they can manipulate. Both sides are.
Why not directing? There’s no big mystery about it. It’s – well, it’s just having a point of view and – and a certain amount of selection and taste.
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.
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.
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.