Natural selection Quote by Jerry A. Coyne

“All living species “adapt.” Indeed, “adaptation” is a distinctive emergent property of life in general. Adaptation means that, over time, the average features of…

— Steven J. Dick

“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

For me, the level at which natural selection causes the phenomenon of adaptation is the level of the replicator - the gene.

— Richard Dawkins

“What is natural selection? Do organisms develop due to an environment, or does the environment only trigger the potential to evolve in almost endless…

— Dejan Stojanovic

It is natural selection that gives direction to changes, orients chance, and slowly, progressively produces more complex structures, new organs, and new species. Novelties…

— Francois Jacob

“The final and most important point about adaptation is really a crucial caveat: no organism is primarily adapted to be healthy, long- lived, happy,…

— Daniel E. Lieberman

Natural abilities are like natural plants; they need pruning by study.

— Anonymous

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 is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up…

— Richard Dawkins

Natural selection is a theory of local adaptation to changing environments. It proposes no perfecting principles, no guarantee of general improvement

— Stephen Jay Gould

“Most people seem to think that organisms develop adaptive traits in response to environmental change. This is bullshit. The environment changes and those who…

— Peter Watts

“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