#mutation

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

#always #am #causes #chose #create

Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time. ↗

— Bertrand Russell

#ask #comes #freedom #goods #life

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. ↗

— Ian Mcewan

#mutation #natural-selection #nature

For the first time in history we can track the evolution of a pandemic in real time. Influenza viruses are notorious for their rapid mutation and unpredictable behaviour. ↗

— Margaret Chan

#evolution #first #first time #history #influenza

Their books are also different. Works of fiction contain a single plot, with all its imaginable permutations. Those of a philosophical nature invariably include both the thesis and the antithesis, the rigorous pro and con of a doctrine. A book which does not contain its counterbook is considered incomplete. ↗

— Jorge Luis Borges

#borges #counterbook #imaginable-permutations #orbis-tertius #tlön

First of all, many human diseases are influenced by, if not caused by mutations in genes. ↗

— Daniel Nathans

#diseases #first #first of all #genes #human

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

#better understood #coming #cultures #evolution #mutant

I declare that The Beatles are mutants. Prototypes of evolutionary agents sent by God, endowed with a mysterious power to create a new human species, a young race of laughing freemen. ↗

— Timothy Leary

#freedom #freemen #music #mutant #mutation

A comparison between the triplets tentatively deduced by these methods with the changes in amino acid sequence produced by mutation shows a fair measure of agreement. ↗

— Francis Crick

#agreement #amino #amino acid #between #changes

Random mutations much more easily debilitate genes than improve them, and that this is true even of the helpful mutations. Let me emphasize, our experience with malaria’s effects on humans (arguably our most highly studied genetic system) shows that most helpful mutations degrade genes. What’s more, as a group the mutations are incoherent, meaning that they are not adding up to some new system. They are just small changes - mostly degradative - in pre-existing, unrelated genes. The take-home lesson is that this is certainly not the kind of process we would expect to build the astonishingly elegant machinery of the cell. If random mutation plus selective pressure substantially trashes the human genome, why should we think that it would be a constructive force in the long term? There is no reason to think so. ↗

— Michael J. Behe

#chance #darwinism #evolution #macro-evolution #macroevolution