# Quote — Stephen Baxter, Evolution

> There was no design in this: no sense of improvement, of purpose. All that was happening was that each organism was struggling to preserve itself, its offspring, and its kin. But as the environment slowly changed, so through relentless selection did the species that inhabited it. It was not a process fueled by life, but by death: the elimination of the less well adapted, the endless culling of inappropriate possibilities. But the potential of an unseen future was no consolation to those who lived through the relentless culling.

- Author: [Stephen Baxter](https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-baxter.md)
- Book: [Evolution](https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-baxter/evolution.md)
- Page: 120
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Stephen_Baxter#Evolution_(2002)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-baxter/evolution/there-was-no-design

## More from this book

> Relentless Pleistocene selection was shaping everything that would make up humanity. Even love was a by-product of evolution. Love, and the pain of loss.

p. 308 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-baxter/evolution/relentless-pleistocene-selection.md)

> In the last centuries of the empire, educational standards and literacy had fallen. In the dulled heads of the masses, distracted by cheap food and the barbaric spectacles of the coliseums, the values on which Rome had been founded and the ancient rationalism of the Greeks had been replaced by mysticism and superstition. It was—Honorius had explained to his pupil—as if a whole culture was losing its mind. People were forgetting how to think, and soon they would forget they had forgotten. And, to Honorius’s thinking, Christianity only exacerbated that problem.
>
> “You know, Augustine warned us that belief in the old myths was fading—even a century and a half ago, as the dogma of the Christians took root. And with the loss of the myths, so vanishes the learning of a thousand years, which are codified in those myths, and the monolithic dogmas of the Church will snuff out rational inquiry for ten more centuries. The light is fading, Athalric.”

p. 502 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-baxter/evolution/in-the-last.md)

> For the genes it made sense, of course. Otherwise it would not have happened.

p. 597 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-baxter/evolution/for-the-genes.md)