Selection Quotes - Page 17

• 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

  Powerful, Technology, Talking

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• With the enormous and steady increase in the volume of our literature, we must rely more and more upon sympathetic selection, judicious editing, and the indexer who knows where to exercise discretion. Any simpleton can write a book, but it requires high skill to make an index.

  Rossiter Johnson

  Book, Writing, Exercise

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• Societies would _not_ be better off if everyone were like Mr Spock, all rationality and no emotion. Instead, a balance - a teaming up of the internal rivals - is optimal for brains. ... Some balance of the emotional and rational systems is needed, and that balance may already be optimized by natural selection in human brains.

  David Eagleman

  Emotional, Brain, Balance

  David Eagleman (2011). “Incognito: The Secret Lives of The Brain”, p.95, Canongate Books

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• 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.

  Terry Pratchett

  Eagles, One Day, Doe

  Terry Pratchett (2008). “Small Gods: (Discworld Novel 13)”, p.10, Random House

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• The debate can be put in the form of the question: Resolved, that the best of money managers cannot be demonstrated to be able to deliver the goods of superior portfolio-selection performance. Any jury that reviews the evidence, and there is a great deal of relevant evidence, must at least come out with the Scottish verdict: Superior investment performance is unproved.

  Paul Samuelson

  Investing, Able, Portfolios

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• However, if "free choice" means more than a small selection between pre-established necessities, and if the inclinations and impulses used in work are other than those preshaped by a repressive reality principle, then satisfaction in daily work is only a rare privilege.

  Herbert Marcuse

  Choices, Free Choice

  "Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud".

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• You can have many different selection systems, but the bottom line has to be a system that, once the judge takes office that judge will feel that he or she is to decide the case without reference to the popular thing or the popular will of the moment

  Stephen Breyer

  Judging, Office, Different

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• 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

  War, Home, Average

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• The fact that natural selection and evolution crafted essentially carbon and water into a mechanism that can think and be conscious means there's nothing in physics that says you cannot do that to a greater degree.

  Neill Blomkamp

  Mean, Thinking, Water

  Source: collider.com

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• Bowl better, Bat better, Catch better, communicate better... Just bloody play better.... I am now available for Selection of Australia..!!!!!

  Michael Vaughan

  Play, Australia, Bats

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• Memory is... similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.

  Alain de Botton

  Memories, Anticipation, Instruments

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• If decisions were a choice between alternatives, decisions would come easy. Decision is the selection and formulation of alternatives.

  Kenneth Burke

  Choices, Decision, Alternatives

  Kenneth Burke (2005). “Here & Elsewhere: The Collected Fiction of Kenneth Burke”, p.146, David R. Godine Publisher

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• I was very pleased with the entire selection process. The manner in which it was conducted included all parts of United States' basketball, from the professional level to the colleges and high schools. Everyone was considered.

  Mike Krzyzewski

  Basketball, School, College

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• 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

  Writing, Society, Common

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• Not every good idea survives. Not every new form of art is repeated. Not every new potential instinct is successful. Only the successful ones get repeated. By natural selection and then through repetition they become probable, more habitual.

  Rupert Sheldrake

  Art, Successful, Ideas

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• Varicose veins are the result of an improper selection of grandparents.

  William Osler

  Grandma, Grandmother, Grandpa

  The Principles and Practice of Medicine p. 130. Appleton, New York (1892)

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• Throughout his last half-dozen books, for example, Arthur Koestler has been conducting a campaign against his own misunderstanding of Darwinism. He hopes to find some ordering force, constraining evolution to certain directions and overriding the influence of natural selection. [...] Darwinism is not the theory of capricious change that Koestler imagines. Random variation may be the raw material of change, but natural selection builds good design by rejecting most variants while accepting and accumulating the few that improve adaptation to local environments.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Book, Design, Example

  "The Panda's Thumb". Book by Stephen Jay Gould. "Double Trouble", pp. 38-40, 1980.

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• Zoocentrism is the primary fallacy of human sociobiology, for this view of human behavior rests on the argument that if the actions of "lower" animals with simple nervous systems arise as genetic products of natural selection, then human behavior should have a similar basis.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Animal, Simple, Views

  "Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes". Book by Stephen Jay Gould. "Our Natural Place", p. 243, 1983.

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• There are selections so acute that they come to define a place, with the result that we can no longer travel through that landscape without being reminded of what a great artist noticed there.

  Alain de Botton

  Artist, Greatness, Landscape

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• If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination.

  Alain de Botton

  Art, Imagination, World

  Alain de Botton (2003). “The Art of Travel”, p.13, Penguin UK

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• 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.

  Charles Darwin

  Powerful, Struggle, Race

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• All history involves selection, and it is always human beings who do the selecting.

  N. T. Wright

  Humans, Human Beings

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• Since the choice of what we curl up with is often crucial for our solace and sanity, we need to learn how to nurture the talent of selection. Book browsing is a meditative art...Books are as essential as breathing.

  Sarah Ban Breathnach

  Art, Book, Breathing

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• In a sense, sexual harassment lawsuits are just the latest version of the female selection process allowing her to select for men who care enough for her to put their career at risk; who have enough finesse to initiate without becoming a jerk and enough guts to initiate despite a potential lawsuit. In the past, though, the process of his overcoming her barriers was called 'courtship.' Now it is called either 'courtship' or 'sexual harassment'.

  Warren Farrell

  Past, Men, Careers

  "The Myth of Male Power". Book by Warren Farrell, 1993.

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• Model building is the art of selecting those aspects of a process that are relevant to the question being asked. As with any art, this selection is guided by taste, elegance, and metaphor; it is a matter of induction, rather than deduction. High science depends on this art.

  John Henry Holland

  Art, Matter, Taste

  John Henry Holland (1995). “Hidden order: how adaptation builds complexity”, Addison-Wesley Longman

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