Adaptation Quote by Stephen Jay Gould

Natural selection is just three factors - over-production, variation, and inheritance combined to produce adaptation to changing local environments. It's not a principle or…

— Stephen Jay Gould

“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

Darwinian natural selection only yields adaptation to changing local environments, and better function in an immediate habitat might just as well be achieved by…

— Stephen Jay Gould

“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 deals ruthlessly with any population, bird or beaver, which fails to solve the problems of its environment with all those resources, learned…

— Robert Ardrey

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

— Charles Darwin

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

As natural selection acts by competition, it adapts the inhabitants of each country only in relation to the degree of perfection of their associates;…

— Charles Darwin

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

“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

Natural selection is anything but random.

— Richard Dawkins