Capable Quote by Hermann Joseph Muller

The basic formulation, or bare-bones mechanics, of natural selection is a disarmingly simple argument, based on three undeniable facts (overproduction of offspring, variation, and…

— Stephen Jay Gould

Natural selection acts solely by accumulating slight successive favorable variations, it can produce no great or sudden modification; it can act only by very…

— Charles Darwin

It is essential for genetic material to be able to make exact copies of itself; otherwise growth would produce disorder, life could not originate,…

— Maurice Wilkins

That natural selection can produce changes within a type is disputed by no one, not even the staunchest creationist. But that it can transform…

— Robert J. Sawyer

“If artificial selection can make such major changes in so short a period of time, what must natural selection, working over billions of years,…

— Carl Sagan

The real problem with natural selection is that it makes no intuitive sense. It is like quantum physics; we may intellectually grasp it, but…

— Paul Bloom

The fundamental biological variant is DNA. That is why Mendel's definition of the gene as the unvarying bearer of hereditary traits, its chemical identification…

— Jacques Monod

As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence,…

— Charles Darwin

I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection.

— Charles Darwin

“In less than ten thousand years, domestication has increased the weight of wool grown by sheep from less than one kilogram of rough hairs…

— Carl Sagan

“Natural selection is a blind and undirected consequence of the interaction between variation and the environment. Natural selection exists only in the continuous present…

— Henry Gee

Although much remains obscure, and will long remain obscure, ... I am convinced that Natural Selection has been the main but not exclusive means…

— Charles Darwin