#natural selection

It was a shock to people of the nineteenth century when they discovered, from observations science had made, that many features of the biological world could be ascribed to the elegant principle of natural selection. ↗

— Michael Behe

#biological #century #could #discovered #elegant

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

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

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

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

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