Top Natural Selection Quotes

What are the chances that we will one day discover that DNA has absolutely nothing to do with inheritance? They are effectively zero.

I'm an Atheist. I don't believe in God, Gods, Godlets or any sort of higher power beyond the universe itself, which seems quite high and powerful enough to me. I don't believe in life after death, cha...

Might one not say that in the chance combination of nature's production, since only those endowed with certain relations of suitability could survive, it is no cause for wonder that this suitability i...

Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.

It wasn't torpor that kept her - she was often restless to the point of irritability. She simply liked to feel that she was prevented from leaving, that she was needed.

The embryological record is almost always abbreviated in accordance with the tendency of nature (to be explained on the principle of survival of the fittest) to attain her needs by the easiest means.

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

Evolution has no long-term goal. There is no long-distance target, no final perfection to serve as a criterion for selection, although human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the...

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 natu...

Evidently neither cats nor dogs, nor other animals that listen to human music, were constituted for the appreciation of it, for it is not of the slightest use to them in the struggle for existence. Mo...

Sexual conflict occurs when one mating partner has an opportunity to increase its fitness at a cost to the other partner. On a genetic level, most sexual conflicts are interlocus conflicts that mainly...

Things exist either because they have recently come into existence or because they have qualities that made them unlikely to be destroyed in the past.

Darwin called such a process artificial, as opposed to natural, selection, but from the flower’s point of view, this is a distinction without a difference: individual plants in which a trait desired b...

It is not always the magnitude of the differences observed between species that must determine specific distinctions, but the constant preservation of those differences in reproduction.

Nevertheless so profound is our ignorance, and so high our presumption, that we marvel when we hear of the extinction of an organic being; and as we do not see the cause, we invoke cataclysms to desol...

One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.

Natural selection favors the forces of psychological denial. The individual benefits as an individual from his ability to deny the truth even though society as a whole, of which he is a part, suffers....

Oxygen flooded into the atmosphere as a pollutant, even a poison, until natural selection shaped living things to thrive on the stuff and, indeed, suffocate without it.

[T]he idea of treating Mind as an effect rather than as a First Cause is too revolutionary for some–an awful stretcher that their own minds cannot acommodate comfortably. This is as true today as it w...

Design in nature is but a concatenation of accidents, culled by natural selection until the result is so beautiful or effective as to seem a miracle of purpose.