#natural selection

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

The difficulty of looking at a system like natural selection if you have any sort of moral sense yourself, is almost what makes it beautiful. ↗

— Paul Bettany

#any #beautiful #difficulty #like #looking

I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection. ↗

— Charles Darwin

#each #i #natural #natural selection #preserved

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

#complexity #cumulative #evolution #existence #explaining

Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous. ↗

— Barbara Ehrenreich

#favors #history #human #human history #natural

Animals can adapt to problems and make inventions, but often no faster than natural selection can do its work - the world acts as its own simulator in the case of natural selection. ↗

— Vernor Vinge

#adapt #case #faster #inventions #make

What an odd time to be a fundamentalist about adaptation and natural selection - when each major subdiscipline of evolutionary biology has been discovering other mechanisms as adjuncts to selection's centrality. ↗

— Stephen Jay Gould

#adaptation #been #biology #centrality #discovering

Ideas percolate. Through natural selection, the best ones survive. ↗

— Andrew Lo

#ideas #natural #natural selection #ones #selection