#natural selection

It is a shock to us in the twentieth century to discover, from observations science has made, that the fundamental mechanisms of life cannot be ascribed to natural selection, and therefore were designed. But we must deal with our shock as best we can and go on. ↗

— Michael Behe

#best #cannot #century #deal #designed

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

#anything #arise #biological #complex #function

Natural selection is anything but random. ↗

— Richard Dawkins

#natural #natural selection #random #selection

Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can only be a proximate explanation. A plane or a car is explained by a designer but that's because the designer himself, the engineer, is explained by natural selection. ↗

— Richard Dawkins

#because #car #design #designer #engineer

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

— Ronald Fisher

#exceedingly #generating #high #high degree #improbability

Natural selection is not evolution. ↗

— Ronald Fisher

#natural #natural selection #selection

My own field of paleontology has strongly challenged the Darwinian premise that life's major transformations can be explained by adding up, through the immensity of geological time, the successive tiny changes produced generation after generation by natural selection. ↗

— Stephen Jay Gould

#after #challenged #changes #darwinian #explained

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

#copies #could #disorder #essential #exact

Natural Selection never made it come to pass, as a habit of nature, that an unsupported stone should move downwards rather than upwards. It applies to no part of inorganic nature, and is very limited even in the phenomena of organic life. ↗

— Chauncey Wright

#come #downwards #even #habit #inorganic

Of course, there is no reconciliation between the theory of evolution by natural selection and the traditional religious view of the origin of the human mind. ↗

— E. O. Wilson

#course #evolution #human #human mind #mind