Natural selection is basically the inevitable outcome of two phenomena that still exist: heritable variation and differential reproductive success. — Daniel Lieberman
In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment. — Charles Darwin
I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection. — Charles Darwin
The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity. — Richard Dawkins
This survival of the fittest implies multiplication of the fittest. — Herbert Spencer
In microbiology the roles of mutation and selection in evolution are coming to be better understood through the use of bacterial cultures of mutant strains. — Edward Lawrie Tatum
Thermodynamics, correctly interpreted, does not just allow Darwinian evolution; it favors it. — Ludwig Boltzmann
Group selection posits that groups of organisms can act in an altruistic way, to protect or benefit the group at the individual’s expense. — Valter Longo
Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. — Theodosius Dobzhansky
Most species do their own evolving, making it up as they go along, which is the way Nature intended. — Terry Pratchett
Blind nature will nearly always select the most probable, but man can let the most improbable become actual. — Hans Jonas
Extinction is the rule, survival is the exception. — Carl Sagan
We are moving from unconscious evolution through natural selection to conscious evolution by choice. — Barbara Marx Hubbard
Short Natural Selection Quotes
Evolution is so creative. That's how we got giraffes. — Kurt Vonnegut
Nature chooses who will be transgender; individuals don't choose this. — Mercedes Ruehl
My theory of evolution is that Darwin was adopted. — Steven Wright
Uniformity is not nature's way; diversity is nature's way. — Vandana Shiva
To sustain longevity, you have to evolve. — Aries Spears
If one way be better than another, that you may be sure is nature's way. — Aristotle
Natural Selection Image Quotes
Intelligent people tend to have less friends than the average person. The smarter you are, the more selevtive you become.
Natural Selection Darwin Quotes
This survival of the fittest which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr. Darwin has called "natural selection", or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life. — Herbert Spencer
Nowhere was Darwin able to point to one bona fide case of natural selection having actually generated evolutionary change in nature....Ultimately, the Darwinian theory of evolution is no more nor less than the great cosmogenic myth of the twentieth century. — Michael Denton
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
Be patient with yourself, nothing in nature blooms all year.
In the meantime, the educated public continues to believe that Darwin has provided all the relevant answers by the magic formula of random mutations plus natural selection -quite unaware of the fact that random mutations turned out to be irrelevant and natural selection tautology. — Arthur Koestler
Darwin's idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition. — Daniel Dennett
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
The axe forgets what the tree remembers.
It is good to keep in mind ... that nobody has ever succeeded in producing even one new species by the accumulation of micromutations. Darwin's theory of natural selection has never had any proof, yet it has been universally accepted. — Richard Goldschmidt
The essence of Darwinism lies in its claim that natural selection creates the fit. Variation is ubiquitous and random in direction. It supplies raw material only. Natural selection directs the course of evolutionary change. — Stephen Jay Gould
If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case. — Charles Darwin
The big picture, I think, is that common ancestry is evidentially prior to natural selection in Darwin's theory and in contemporary evolutionary biology as well. — Elliott Sober
Survival Of The Fittest Quotes
We do not accept that human society should be constructed on the basis of a savage principle of the survival of the fittest — Thabo Mbeki
When I played ball, I didn't play for fun. . . . It's no pink tea, and mollycoddles had better stay out. It's a contest and everything that implies, a struggle for supremacy, a survival of the fittest. — Ty Cobb
In every walk with the nature one receives far more than he seeks.
Instead of working for the survival of the fittest, we should be working for the survival of the wittiest - then we can all die laughing. — Lily Tomlin
The fittest survive. What is meant by the fittest? Not the strongest; not the cleverest - weakness and stupidity everywhere survive. There is no way of determining fitness except in that a thing does survive. 'Fitness,' then, is only another name for 'survival.' Darwinism: That survivors survive. — Charles Fort
The survival of the fittest is the ageless law of nature, but the fittest are rarely the strong. The fittest are those endowed with the qualifications for adaptation, the ability to accept the inevitable and conform to the unavoidable, to harmonize with existing or changing conditions. — Dave Smalley
Each time you read a book, a tree smiles knowing there's life after death.
The unrestricted competition so commonly advocated does not leave us the survival of the fittest. The unscrupulous succeed best in accumulating wealth. — Rutherford B. Hayes
The expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient. — Charles Darwin
A drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be...The law of survival of the fittest was not made by man, and it cannot be abrogated by man. We can only, by interfering with it, produce the survival of the unfittest. — William Graham Sumner
All that is really necessary for survival of the fittest, it seems, is an interest in life, good, bad or peculiar. — Grace Paley
How does a pansy, for example, select the ingredients from soil to get the right colors for the flower? Now there's a great miracle. I think there's a supreme power behind all of this. I see it in nature. — Clyde Tombaugh
Natural selection didn’t stop when farming started but instead has continued and continues to adapt populations to changing diets, germs, and environments. Yet the rate and power of cultural evolution has vastly outpaced the rate and power of natural selection, and the bodies we inherited are still adapted to a significant extent to the various and diverse environmental conditions in which we evolved over millions of years. The end product of all that evolution is that we are big-brained, moderately fat bipeds who reproduce relatively rapidly but take a long time to mature. — Daniel Lieberman
One of the effects of civilization is to diminish the rigour of the application of the law of natural selection. It preserves weakly lives that would have perished in barbarous lands. — Francis Galton
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge. — Charles Darwin
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
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
Hatred as an element of the struggle; a relentless hatred of the enemy, impelling us over and beyond the natural limitations that man is heir to and transforming him into an effective, violent, selective and cold killing machine. Our soldiers must be thus; a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy. — Che Guevara
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
Great is the power of steady misrepresentation; but the history of science shows that fortunately this power does not long endure. — Charles Darwin
Great is the power of steady misrepresentation — Charles Darwin
Trout aren't naturally as selective as they've become in crowded tailwaters - they've been trained to be like that by too much fishing pressure. I've seen tailwater fish that are so hysterical they'll refuse naturals. You wonder how they get enough to eat. — John Gierach
I see humanity now as one vast plant, needing for its highest fulfillment only love, the natural blessings of the great outdoors, and intelligent crossing and selection. — Luther Burbank
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
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
Natural selection acts solely by accumulating slight successive favorable variations, it can produce no great or sudden modification; it can act only by very short steps. — Charles Darwin
Endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved — Charles Darwin
To suppose that the eye could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree — Charles Darwin
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
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
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
To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree. — Charles Darwin
I think it inevitably follows, that as new species in the course of time are formed through natural selection, others will become rarer and rarer, and finally extinct. The forms which stand in closest competition with those undergoing modification and improvement will naturally suffer most. — Charles Darwin
People will say, "You're never going to convince me that something as complicated as an eye could come about by sheer chance." And the answer is that natural selection is the very opposite of sheer chance. Natural selection is a non-random process. — Richard Dawkins
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
Suffering is a byproduct of evolution by natural selection, an inevitable consequence that may worry us in our more sympathetic moments but cannot be expected to worry a tiger - even if a tiger can be said to worry about anything at all - and certainly cannot be expected to worry its genes. — Richard Dawkins
Natural selection must be replaced by eugenical artificial selection. This idea constitutes the sound core of eugenics, the applied science of human betterment. — Theodosius Dobzhansky
Homo sapiens, the first truly free species, is about to decommission natural selection, the force that made us. Soon we must look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become. — E. O. Wilson
Mutation is random; natural selection is the very opposite of random. — Richard Dawkins
Proponents of intelligent design don't accept that some of the very complex nanomachines that we have inside ourselves could have come about solely on the basis of natural selection. — Francis Collins
It is essential for genetic material to be able to make exact copies of itself; otherwise growth would produce disorder, life could not originate, and favourable forms would not be perpetuated by natural selection. — Maurice Wilkins
We're all puppets, and our best hope for even partial liberation is to try to decipher the logic of the puppeteer. Just because natural selection created us doesn't mean we have to slavishly follow its peculiar agenda. (If anything, we might be tempted to spite it for all the ridiculous baggage it's saddled us with.) — Robert Wright
I would give absolutely nothing for the theory of Natural Selection, if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent. — Charles Darwin
From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of higher animals, directly follows. — Charles Darwin
Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress. — Charles Darwin
In Conclusion
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