#selection

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

I use a wide selection of colours. It is impossible to produce work like mine using only the primary colours as they only mix a certain range of colour. ↗

— John Dyer

#colour #colours #i #impossible #like

David Buss has amassed a lot of evidence that human females across many cultures tend to prefer males who have high social status, good income, ambition, intelligence, and energy--contrary to the views of some cultural anthropologists, who assume that people vary capriciously in their sexual preferences across different cultures. He interpreted this as evidence that women evolved to prefer good providers who could support their families by acquiring and defending resources I respect his data enormously, but disagree with his interpretation. The traits women prefer are certainly correlated with male abilities to provide material benefits, but they are also correlated with heritable fitness. If the same traits can work both as fitness indicators and as wealth indicators, so much the better. The problem comes when we try to project wealth indicators back into a Pleistocene past when money did not exist, when status did not imply wealth, and when bands did not stay in one place long enough to defend piles of resources. Ancestral women may have preferred intelligent, energetic men for their ability to hunt more effectively and provide their children with more meat. But I would suggest it was much more important that intelligent men tended to produce intelligent, energetic children more likely to survive and reproduce, whether or not their father stayed around. In other words, I think evolutionary psychology has put too much emphasis on male resources instead of male fitness in explaining women's sexual preferences. ↗

— Geoffrey Miller

#sexual-selection #family

You were told how much space so it was a matter of whether you could send in two paintings or three paintings, you know, pending where the show was being held. You did submit work to be accepted. Once you were accepted that was it. You did your own selection of what went in. ↗

— Lee Krasner

#being #could #did #held #how

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

Great wealth took possession of the government. It was reflected in Mr. Harding's selection of a cabinet. ↗

— George William Norris

#government #great #harding #mr #possession

Life on earth evolved gradually beginning with one primitive life form – perhaps a self-replicating molecule – that lived more than 3.5 billion years ago; it then branched out over time, throwing off many new and diverse species; and the mechanism for most (but not all) of evolutionary change is natural selection. ↗

— Jerry A. Coyne

#natural-selection #change

...and specimens like this confirmed there had been some kind of divine rule in the universe because no natural selection process was up to the task of creating something like him. This was some god’s, somewhere’s, handiwork. ↗

— Nicole Williams

#evolution #humor #humour #intelligent-design #natural-selection