Selection Quotes - Page 13

• Selection of crews is always been somewhat of a mystery.

  Robert Crippen

  Mystery, Crew

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• 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

  Inspiration, Islands, World

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• 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

  Beautiful, Moral, Natural

  "Paul Bettany: Playing Darwin with Creation". Interview with Adam Rutherford, www.theguardian.com. February 11, 2009.

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• 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

  Natural, Select, Arise

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• 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

  People, Principles, World

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• 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

  Fundamentals, Goes On, Natural

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• 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.

  Gerhard Richter

  Art, Arbitrary, Painting

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• Composition is a side issue. Its role in my selection of photographs is a negative one at best. By which I mean that the fascination of a photograph is not in its eccentric composition but in what it has to say: its information content. And, on the other hand, composition always also has its own fortuitous rightness.

  Gerhard Richter

  Art, Mean, Issues

  Gerhard Richter, Dietmar Elger, Hans-Ulrich Obrist (2009). “Gerhard Richter: text : writings, interviews and letters, 1961-2007”

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• An argument often given for why Earth couldn't host another form of life is that once the life we know became established, it would have eliminated any competition through natural selection. But if another form of life were confined to its own niche, there would be little direct competition with regular life.

  Paul Davies

  Competition, Would Be, Earth

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• 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

  Antibiotics, Bacteria, Gains

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• A lifestyle involves a cluster of habits and orientations, and hence has a certain unity - important to a continuing sense of ontological security - that connects options in a more or less ordered pattern. (...) [T]he selection or creation of lifestyles is influenced by group pressures and the visibility of role models, as well as by socioeconomic circumstances.

  Anthony Giddens

  Role Models, Unity, Important

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• The selection of a Republican candidate for the presidency of this globalized and expansive empire is - and I mean this seriously - the greatest competition of idiocy and ignorance that has ever been.

  Fidel Castro

  Ignorance, Mean, Competition

  "Made in the World". www.nytimes.com. January 28, 2012.

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• We add that it would be all too easy to object that mutations have no evolutionary effect because they are eliminated by natural selection. Lethal mutations (the worst kind) are effectively eliminated, but others persist as alleles. ...Mutants are present within every population, from bacteria to man. There can be no doubt about it. But for the evolutionist, the essential lies elsewhere: in the fact that mutations do not coincide with evolution.

  Pierre-Paul Grasse

  Lying, Men, Doubt

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• One reason that a truth and reconciliation process is needed for group selection is to return to the simplicity of the original problem and Darwin’s solution. As Ed Wilson and I put it in our recent review article titled “Rethinking the Theoretical Foundation of Sociobiology“: Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.

  David Sloan Wilson

  Selfish, Simplicity, Foundation

  "Truth and Reconciliation for Group Selection II: The Original Problem" by David Sloan Wilson, www.huffingtonpost.com. January 1, 2009.

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• Quantitative work shows clearly that natural selection is a reality, and that, among other things, it selects Mendelian genes, which are known to be distributed at random through wild populations, and to follow the laws of chance in their distribution to offspring. In other words, they are an agency producing variation of the kind which Darwin postulated as the raw material on which selection acts.

  John B. S. Haldane

  Reality, Agency, Law

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• Evolution thus is merely contingent on certain processes articulated by Darwin: variation and selection.

  Ernst Mayr

  Variation, Evolution, Process

  Ernst Mayr (1988). “Toward a New Philosophy of Biology: Observations of an Evolutionist”, p.457, Harvard University Press

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

  Ronald Fisher

  Math, Degrees, Statistics

  "Evolution in Action". Book by Julian S. Huxley, 1953.

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• Even if any given terminology is a reflection of reality, by its very nature as a terminology it must be a selection of reality; and to this extent it must function also as a deflection of reality.

  Kenneth Burke

  Reflection, Reality, Given

  Kenneth Burke (1966). “Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method”, p.45, Univ of California Press

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• Airplanes were invented by natural selection. Now you can say that intelligent design designs our airplanes of today, but there was no intelligent design really designing those early airplanes. There were probably at least 30,000 different things tried, and when they crash and kill the pilot, don't try that again.

  Burt Rutan

  Airplane, Intelligent, Design

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• 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

  Mutation, Causes, Natural

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• The great philosophers and the great works are standards for the selection of what is essential. Everything that we do in studying the history of philosophy ultimately serves their better understanding.

  Karl Jaspers

  Philosophy, Understanding, Essentials

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• 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

  Nature, Culture, World

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• 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

  Long, Goal, Firsts

  "The Origin of Humankind". Book by Richard Leakey, 1994.

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• People exercise an unconscious selection in being influenced.

  T. S. Eliot

  Exercise, People, Influence

  T.S. Eliot (1950). “Selected Essays”

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• I write because I want more than one life; I insist on a wider selection. It's greed, plain and simple.

  Anne Tyler

  Writing, Simple, Greed

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