Selection Quotes - Page 18

• The widespread inability to understand technological artifacts as fabricated entities, as social and cultural phenomena, derives from the fact that in retrospect only those technologies that prove functional for a culture and can be integrated into everyday life are 'left over.' However, the perception of what is functional, successful and useful is itself the product of social and cultural--and last but not least--political and economic processes. Selection processes and abandoned products and product forms are usually not discussed.

  Johannes Grenzfurthner

  Successful, Technology, Political

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• 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.

  Arlene Dahl

  Smart, Wine, Men

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

  Richard Dawkins

  Selfish, Opposites, Society

  "The Blind Watchmaker". Book by Richard Dawkins, 1986.

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

  Charles Darwin

  Eye, Theory Of Evolution, Creation Science

  Charles Darwin (1861). “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection; Or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”, p.167

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• Our world is not an optimal place, fine tuned by omnipotent forces of selection. It is a quirky mass of imperfections, working well enough (often admirably); a jury-rigged set of adaptations built of curious parts made available by past histories in different contexts. A world optimally adapted to current environments is a world without history, and a world without history might have been created as we find it. History matters; it confounds perfection and proves that current life transformed its own past.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Past, Our World, Perfection

  "The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History". Book by Stephen Jay Gould. "Only His Wings Remained", p. 54, 1985.

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• Darwinian natural selection only yields adaptation to changing local environments, and better function in an immediate habitat might just as well be achieved by greater simplicity in form and behavior as by ever-increasing complexity.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Yield, Simplicity, Might

  Stephen Jay Gould (2011). “Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms”, p.355, Harvard University Press

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• Selection is the invention of the landscape painter.

  Henry Fuseli

  Landscape, Invention, Painter

  1789 Aphorisms on Art, no.237, (published 1831).

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• 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.

  Charles Darwin

  Mean, Long, Obscure

  Charles Darwin, James T. Costa (2009). “The Annotated Origin: A Facsimile of the First Edition of On the Origin of Species”, p.6, Harvard University Press

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

  Charles Darwin

  Perfection, Progress, Natural

  Charles Darwin (1875). “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, Or The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life”, p.428

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• I think George Mitchell is a consummate professional. He is the ideal selection to handle the job of special envoy if you choose to have a special envoy.

  John F. Kerry

  Jobs, Thinking, Special

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

  Richard Dawkins

  Dna, Archives, Rivals

  Richard Dawkins (2015). “The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design”, p.124, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Human social institutions can effect the course of human evolution. Just as climate, food supply, predators, and other natural forces of selection have molded our nature, so too can our culture.

  Peter Singer

  Climate, Culture, Predator

  Peter Singer (1982). “The expanding circle: ethics and sociobiology”, Plume

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• Photography is unlike any other art form. In the other arts there is always a continuous interplay between the artist and his art. He has the painting or sculpture before him. What we have tried to do is to provide a medium for "artistic expression" to anyone with only a reasonable amount of time. By giving him a camera system with which he need only control his selection of focus, composition and lighting, we free him to select the moment and to criticize immediately what he has done. We enable him to see what else he wants to do on the basis of what he has just learned.

  Edwin Land

  Photography, Art, Expression

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• Women are free in the Islamic Republic in the selection of their activities and their future and their clothing.

  Ruhollah Khomeini

  Islamic, Republic, Clothings

  The Guardian (Paris) Interview, November 6, 1978.

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• There is no gene "for" such unambiguous bits of morphology as your left kneecap or your fingernail. [...] Hundreds of genes contribute to the building of most body parts and their action is channeled through a kaleidoscopic series of environmental influences: embryonic and postnatal, internal and external. Parts are not translated genes, and selection doesn't even work directly on parts.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Environmental, Body, Action

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History”, p.91, W. W. Norton & Company

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• The human brain became large by natural selection (who knows why, but presumably for good cause). Yet surely most "things" now done by our brains, and essential both to our cultures and to our very survival, are epiphenomena of the computing power of this machine, not genetically grounded Darwinian entities created specifically by natural selection for their current function.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Brain, Survival, Essentials

  "An Urchin in the Storm: Essays About Books and Ideas". Book by Stephen Jay Gould. "Cardboard Darwinism", pp. 48 - 49, 1987.

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• Yes, I spent two long years, traveling all over the United States, all over Europe, interviewing many, many, many people who had been thrown out of their academic jobs because they taught that there was a possibility of life coming from something other than Darwinism, who thought that possibly random selection and mutations didn't account for the universe, didn't account for gravity, didn't account for why nobody had ever seen an individual species evolve - no one's ever seen an individual species evolve!

  Ben Stein

  Jobs, Two, Years

  Fox News Documentary, April 14, 2008.

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• A complete theory of evolution must acknowledge a balance between "external" forces of environment imposing selection for local adaptation and "internal" forces representing constraints of inheritance and development. Vavilov placed too much emphasis on internal constraints and downgraded the power of selection. But Western Darwinians have erred equally in practically ignoring (while acknowledging in theory) the limits placed on selection by structure and development what Vavilov and the older biologists would have called "laws of form.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Law, Theory Of Evolution, Balance

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History”, p.144, W. W. Norton & Company

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• When the press writes scare stories about the global labor supply draining jobs from rich to poor places, the story is usually presented as a "race to the bottom" simply in terms of wages. Capitalism supposedly looks for labor wherever labor is cheapest. This story is half wrong. A kind of cultural selection is also at work, so that jobs leave high-wage countries like the United States and Germany, but migrate to low-wage economies with skilled, sometimes overqualified workers.

  Richard Sennett

  Country, Jobs, Writing

  Richard Sennett (2007). “The Culture of the New Capitalism”, p.87, Yale University Press

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• When I was dating and the wine list was presented to my male companion, I tried to ignore this unfortunate faux pas. But this practice still goes on...Closing note to all servers and sommeliers: please include women in wine selection. Okay?

  Alpana Singh

  Wine, Practice, Dating

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• What had been released into the desert vacuum and starry oases of the galaxy was the inexorable logic of reproduction and natural selection. What followed was parasitism, predation, symbiosis, interdependency chaos, complexity, life.

  Robert Charles Wilson

  Oasis, Vacuums, Desert

  Robert Charles Wilson (2011). “Vortex”, p.304, Macmillan

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• In one of my latest conversations with Darwin he expressed himself very gloomily on the future of humanity, on the ground that in our modern civilization natural selection had no play, and the fittest did not survive. Those who succeed in the race for wealth are by no means the best or the most intelligent, and it is notorious that our population is more largely renewed in each generation from the lower than from the middle and upper classes.

  Alfred Russel Wallace

  Mean, Intelligent, Race

  Alfred Russel Wallace (1991). “Alfred Russel Wallace: An Anthology of His Shorter Writings”, Oxford University Press, USA

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• Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is the only workable explanation that has ever been proposed for the remarkable fact of our own existence, indeed the existence of all life wherever it may turn up in the universe.

  John Maynard Smith

  Theory Of Evolution, May, Facts

  John Maynard Smith (1993). “The Theory of Evolution”, p.15, Cambridge University Press

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• The underlying reason for convergence seems to be that all organisms are under constant scrutiny of natural selection and are also subject to the constraints of the physical and chemical factors that severely limit the action of all inhabitants of the biosphere. Put simply, convergence shows that in a real world not all things are possible.

  Simon Conway Morris

  Real, World, Limits

  "The Crucible of Creation". Book by Simon Conway Morris, 1998.

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• Professor Eddington has recently remarked that 'The law that entropy always increases - the second law of thermodynamics - holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of nature'. It is not a little instructive that so similar a law [the fundamental theorem of natural selection] should hold the supreme position among the biological sciences.

  Ronald Fisher

  Thinking, Law, Fundamentals

  "The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection". Book by Ronald Fisher, 1930.

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