#natural 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

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

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

Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection determined the evolution of cultures in the same manner as it did that of species. ↗

— Konrad Lorenz

#determined #did #evolution #face #fact

Darwin's idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition. ↗

— Daniel Dennett

#darwin #direction #idea #makes #natural

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

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