Quotes about evolution

A primary reason that evolution—of life-forms or technology—speeds up is that it builds on its own increasing order.

Evolution is a process of creating patterns of increasing order....I believe that it's the evolution of patterns that constitutes the ultimate story of our world.

Evolution has meant that our prefrontal lobes are too small, our adrenal glands are too big, and our reproductive organs apparently designed by committee; a recipe which, alone or in combination, is very certain to lead to some unhappiness and disorder.

Our genes push us in certain directions, but our genes aren’t the only things shaping us, and thus we can often push right back.

The idea that a few people have about the gene being the target of selection is completely impractical; a gene is never visible to natural selection, and in the genotype, it is always in the context with other genes, and the interaction with those other genes make a particular gene either more favorable or less favorable. In fact, Dobzhanksy, for instance, worked quite a bit on so-called lethal chromosomes which are highly successful in one combination, and lethal in another. Therefore people like Dawkins in England who still think the gene is the target of selection are evidently wrong. In the 30s and 40s, it was widely accepted that genes were the target of selection, because that was the only way they could be made accessible to mathematics, but now we know that it is really the whole genotype of the individual, not the gene. Except for that slight revision, the basic Darwinian theory hasn't changed in the last 50 years

Powell repressed the wave of exasperation that rose up in him. It was not exasperation with Chooka. It was anger for the relentless force of evolution that insisted on endowing man with increased powers without removing the vestigial vices that prevented him from using them.

Evolution tells us where we came from, not where we can go.

We are the one creature to whom natural selection has bequeathed a brain complex enough to comprehend the laws that govern the universe. And we should be proud that we are the only species that has figured out how we came to be.

“Evolution is cut-and-try. If I may anthropomorphize,” he added. “Often it’s hard not to.”

Something as biologically fundamental as death ought to be in the very fabric of evolution virtually from the beginning.

[Even Darwin’s] natural selection only predicts that survivors will be fit enough, that is, fitter than their losing competitors; it postulates satisficing, not optimizing.

Are we not natural creatures? Are we not evolved, too? Surely all the lessons we’ve learned in the past century come to a single point: we have to stop thinking of ourselves as somehow apart from nature, and recognise that we’re inseparable from it.