#natural selection

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

Why do people believe that there are dangerous implications of the idea that the mind is a product of the brain, that the brain is organized in part by the genome, and that the genome was shaped by natural selection? ↗

— Steven Pinker

#brain #dangerous #genome #idea #implications

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