Natural Selection Quotes - Page 8

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

Atheist, Italian, Thinking

Douglas Adams, Stephen Fry (2012). “The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time”, p.61, Pan Macmillan

4 Copy quote

Show source
Natural selection may lead to benefits for species, but these `higher' advantages can only arise as sequelae, or side consequences, of natural selection's causal mechanism: differential reproductive success of individuals.

Stephen Jay Gould

May, Sides, Benefits

Stephen Jay Gould (1995). “Dinosaur in a haystack: reflections in natural history”, Harmony

4 Copy quote

Show source
People are only animals, but special animals. Every animal has fought and killed to survive, even before the dinosaurs. We're the only ones that do it for fun. That's why I don't know about Darwinism. Supposedly evolution and natural selection are all about survival, but we haven't gotten smarter over the years, only more dangerous.

Kurt Vonnegut

Fun, Animal, Years

4 Copy quote
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

Funny, Home, Humor

Song: More Drugs, Album: No Cure For Cancer

7 Copy quote

Show source
There is no other species on Earth that does science. It is, so far, entirely a human invention, evolved by natural selection in the cerebral cortex for one simple reason: it works. It is not perfect. It can be misused. It is only a tool. But it is by far the best tool we have, self-correcting, ongoing, applicable to everything.

Carl Sagan

Simple, Self, Perfect

Carl Sagan (2011). “Cosmos”, p.362, Ballantine Books

4 Copy quote

Show source
On the theory of natural selection we can clearly understand the full meaning of that old canon in natural history, “Natura non facit saltum.” This canon, if we look only to the present inhabitants of the world, is not strictly correct, but if we include all those of past times, it must by my theory be strictly true.

Charles Darwin

Past, Looks, World

Charles Darwin (1869). “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: Or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”, p.183

19 Copy quote

Show source
In fact, books are still being published by the lunatic fringe with the same explanation. In case this book should be read by some fundamentalist searching for straws to prop up his prejudices, let me state categorically that all my experience (such as it is) has led me to an unqualified acceptance of evolution by natural selection as a sufficient explanation for what I have seen in the fossil record.

D. V. Ager

Book, Acceptance, Science

5 Copy quote
The lowest strata are reproducing too fast. Therefore... they must not have too easy access to relief or hospital treatment lest the removal of the last check on natural selection should make it too easy for children to be produced or to survive; long unemployment should be a ground for sterilisation.

Julian Huxley

Children, Long, Relief

Julian Huxley (1944). “Man in the Modern World”

37 Copy quote

Show source
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

Principles, Variation, Levels

7 Copy quote
Whether you like it or not, the digital age has produced a new format for modern romance, and natural selection may be favoring the quick-thumbed quip peddler over the confident, ice-breaking alpha male.

Ashton Kutcher

Ice, Romance, Age

10 Copy quote
Truly, this earth is a trophy cup for the industrious man. And this rightly so, in the service of natural selection. He who does not possess the force to secure his Lebensraum in this world, and, if necessary, to enlarge it, does not deserve to possess the necessities of life. He must step aside and allow stronger peoples to pass him by.

Adolf Hitler

Men, Stronger, Doe

Max Domarus, Adolf Hitler (1990). “Hitler: speeches and proclamations, 1932-1945 : the chronicle of a dictatorship”

5 Copy quote

Show source
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

Love Life, Giving, Lovely

31 Copy quote
The fundamental biological variant is DNA. That is why Mendel's definition of the gene as the unvarying bearer of hereditary traits, its chemical identification by Avery (confirmed by Hershey), and the elucidation by Watson and Crick of the structural basis of its replicative invariance, are without any doubt the most important discoveries ever made in biology. To this must be added the theory of natural selection, whose certainty and full significance were established only by those later theories.

Jacques Monod

Science, Dna, Discovery

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

Theodore Levitt

Science, Ideas, Imagination

Theodore Levitt (1986). “Marketing Imagination: New, Expanded Edition”, p.127, Simon and Schuster

10 Copy quote

Show source
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

Science, Differences, Variation

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

Richard Dawkins

Religion, Atheism, Natural

4 Copy quote
That there is much suffering in the world no one disputes. Which is more likely, that pain and evil are the result of an all-powerful and good God, or the product of uncaring natural forces? The presence of much suffering agrees well with the view that all organic beings have been developed through variation and natural selection.

Charles Darwin

Pain, Powerful, Views

34 Copy quote
In fact, nothing in science as a whole has been more firmly established by interwoven factual information, or more illuminating than the universal occurrence of biological evolution. Further, few natural processes have been more convincingly explained than evolution by the theory of natural selection, or as it has been popularly called, Darwinism.

E. O. Wilson

Religion, Atheism, Information

4 Copy quote
I am aware that the conclusions arrived at in this work will be denounced by some as highly irreligious; but he who denounces them is bound to show why it is more irreligious to explain the origin of man as a distinct species by descent from some lower from, through the laws of variation and natural selection, than to explain the birth of the individual through the laws of ordinary reproduction. The birth both of the species and of the individual are equally parts of that grand sequence of events, which our minds refuse to accept as the result of blind chance.

Charles Darwin

Men, Law, Mind

Charles Darwin (1883). “The Descent of Man and Seletion in Relation to Sex”, p.613, Рипол Классик

13 Copy quote

Show source
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

Roles, Today, Facts

4 Copy quote
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

Groups, Extinction, Ancestry

24 Copy quote
Even today a good many distinguished minds seem unable to accept or even to understand that from a source of noise natural selection alone and unaided could have drawn all the music of the biosphere. In effect natural selection operates upon the products of chance and can feed nowhere else; but it operates in a domain of very demanding conditions, and from this domain chance is barred. It is not to chance but to these conditions that eveloution owes its generally progressive cource, its successive conquests, and the impresssion it gives of a smooth and steady unfolding.

Jacques Monod

Science, Acceptance, Giving

59 Copy quote
Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences, has no purpose in view. Yet the living results of natural selection overwhelmingly impress us with the appearance of design as if by a master watchmaker, impress us with the illusion of design and planning.

Richard Dawkins

Atheist, Views, Design

Richard Dawkins (2015). “The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design”, p.31, W. W. Norton & Company

45 Copy quote

Show source
Opponents say natural selection is not a theory supported by observation or experiment; that it is not based on fact; and that it cannot be proved. Well, no, you cannot prove the theory to people who won't believe in it any more than you can prove that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066. However, we know the battle happened then, just as we know the course of evolution on earth unambiguously shows that Darwin was right.

David Attenborough

Believe, People, Battle

"How Darwin won the evolution race" by Robin McKie, www.theguardian.com. June 21, 2008.

8 Copy quote

Show source
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

Religious, Views, Theory Of Evolution

4 Copy quote

You May Also Like Quotes On:

Natural

Naturalism

Nature

Select