Quotes About Evolution

senile decay is simply a by-product of the accumulation in the gene pool of late-acting lethal and semi-lethal genes, which have been allowed to slip through the net of natural selection simply because they are late-acting.

Just by chance, you could happen to give all your mother's versions to your child, and none of your father's. In this case, your father would have given no DNA to his grandchild. Of course such a scenario is highly unlikely, but as we go down to more distant descendants, total non-contribution of DNA becomes more possible.

evolution is blind to the future

The evolution of the capacity to simulate seems to have culminated in subjective consciousness.

Just as a linguist penetrates the past to Proto-Indo-European, triangulating from modern languages and from already reconstructed dead languages, we can do the same with modern organisms, comparing either their external characteristics or their protein or DNA sequences.

No matter how much knowledge and wisdom you acquire during your life, not one jot will be passed on to your children by genetic means. Each new generation starts from scratch. A body is the genes' way of preserving the genes unaltered.

An ESS is stable, not because it is particularly good for the individuals participating in it, but simply because it is immune to treachery from within.

The genes in one organism's cells, then, can have extended phenotypic influence on the living body of another organism; in this case a parasite's genes find phenotypic expression in the behaviour of its host.

There exists no objective basis on which to elevate one species above another.

Darwin himself said as much: 'If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.' Darwin could find no such case, and nor has anybody since Darwin's time, despite strenuous, indeed desperate, efforts. Many candidates for this holy grail of creationism have been proposed. None has stood up to analysis.

Dan Nilsson even remarks of compound eyes that 'It is only a small exaggeration to say that evolution seems to be fighting a desperate battle to improve a basically disastrous design.

When challenged by a zealous Popperian to say how evolution could ever be falsified, J. B. S. Haldane famously growled: 'Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian.

One gene may be regarded as a unit that survives through a large number of successive individual bodies.

There is no universally agreed definition of a gene.

If there are versions of the evolution theory that deny slow gradualism, and deny the central role of natural selection, they may be true in particular cases. But they cannot be the whole truth, for they deny the very heart of the evolution theory, which gives it the power to dissolve astronomical improbabilities and explain prodigies of apparent miracle.

The genetic code is universal. I regard this as near-conclusive proof that all organisms are descended from a single common ancestor.

how unordered atoms could group themselves into ever more complex patterns until they ended up manufacturing people.

It is the plain truth that we are cousins of chimpanzees, somewhat more distant cousins of monkeys, more distant cousins still of aardvarks and manatees, yet more distant cousins of bananas and turnips

The earliest form of natural selection was simply a selection of stable forms and a rejection of unstable ones. There is no mystery about this. It had to happen by definition.

The evolution of complex life, indeed its very existence in a universe obeying physical laws, is wonderfully surprising - or would be but for the fact that surprise is an emotion that can exist only in a brain which is the product of that very surprising process

the closing words of my first book, 'We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.

An itinerant selfish gene Said 'Bodies a plenty I've seen. You think you're so clever But I'll live for ever. You're just a survival machine.

There is no inconsistency in favouring Darwinism as an academic scientist while opposing it as a human being;

So, the question is: If greenflies and elm trees don't do it, why do the rest of us go to such lengths to mix our genes up with somebody else's before we make a baby? It does seem an odd way to proceed. Why did sex, that bizarre perversion of straightforward replication, ever arise in the first place? What is the good of sex?*