Ancestry Quote by Elliott Sober

Evolutionary biologists often appeal to parsimony when they seek to explain why organisms "match" with respect to a given trait. For example, why do…

— Elliott Sober

The big picture, I think, is that common ancestry is evidentially prior to natural selection in Darwin's theory and in contemporary evolutionary biology as…

— Elliott Sober

I find the idea of common descent (that all organisms share a common ancestor) fairly convincing, and have no particular reason to doubt it.

— Michael Behe

Darwin repeatedly used the hypothesis of common ancestry as a platform on which to build his various ideas about testing hypotheses concerning natural selection.…

— Elliott Sober

For example, both humans and chimps have a broken copy of a gene that in other mammals helps make vitamin C. ... It's hard…

— Michael Behe

“The genetic code is a product of biology and is messy, illogical and inelegant. It is highly redundant, but to bewilderingly varied degrees: one…

— Matthew Cobb

At the deepest level, all living things that have ever been looked at have the same DNA code. And many of the same genes.

— Richard Dawkins

“Biochemists assume that the three cellular kingdoms evolved from a single common ancestor, because the alternative of supposing an independent origin of life two…

— Phillip E. Johnson

In Earth, among millions of lineages or organisms and perhaps 50 billion speciation events, only one led to high intelligence ; this makes me…

— Ernst Mayr

The issue, as correctly emphasized by Carl Sagan, is the probability of the evolution of high intelligence and an electronic civilization on an inhabited…

— Ernst Mayr

“Genes were no longer mysterious embodiments of specificity, they were information – a code – that could be transmitted (another word from the electronic…

— Matthew Cobb

Earlier attempts to show that simpler theories always have higher prior probabilities have failed, but there is a restricted circumstance in which the claim…

— Elliott Sober