#selection

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

— Daniel Dennett

#darwin #direction #idea #makes #natural

Some of you read with me 40 years ago a portion of Aristotle's Ethics, a selection of passages that describe his idea of happiness. You may not remember too well. ↗

— Charles Van Doren

#aristotle #describe #ethics #happiness #his

You never really know as an actor; it's completely out of your control, in terms of editing, and music, and film stock, shot selection, and what takes they use. ↗

— Aaron Eckhart

#completely #control #editing #film #know

I think people forget that to be on the A list you first had to go through the original graded Parliamentary Selection Board. I did that and then like everyone else had the further interviews to get onto the A list. ↗

— Adam Rickitt

#did #else #everyone #first #forget

Downloading is definitely on the rise, but not because it's free - that's probably third on the list - but because it's immediate and the selection is virtually unlimited. ↗

— Don Rose

#definitely #downloading #free #immediate #list

I could show fight on natural selection having done and doing more for the progress of civilization than you seem inclined to admit. Remember what risk the nations of Europe ran, not so many centuries ago of being overwhelmed by the Turks, and how ridiculous such an idea now is! The more civilised so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world. ↗

— Charles Darwin

#eugenics #natural-selection #nazism #racial-superiority #racism

The very comprehensibility of the world points to an intelligence behind the world. Indeed, science would be impossible if our intelligence were not adapted to the intelligibility of the world. The match between our intelligence and the intelligibility of the world is no accident. Nor can it properly be attributed to natural selection, which places a premium on survival and reproduction and has no stake in truth or conscious thought. Indeed, meat-puppet robots are just fine as the output of a Darwinian evolutionary process. ↗

— William A. Dembski

#chance #coincidence #consciousness #darwinism #evolution

Nevertheless so profound is our ignorance, and so high our presumption, that we marvel when we hear of the extinction of an organic being; and as we do not see the cause, we invoke cataclysms to desolate the world, or invent laws on the duration of the forms of life! ↗

— Charles Darwin

#natural-selection #species #life

It wasn't torpor that kept her - she was often restless to the point of irritability. She simply liked to feel that she was prevented from leaving, that she was needed. ↗

— Ian Mcewan

#mutation #natural-selection #nature

Natural selection involves no plan, no goal, and no direction — just genes increasing and decreasing in frequency depending on whether individuals with those genes have, relative to other individuals, greater or lesser reproductive success. ↗

— Randolph M. Nesse

#natural-selection #nature