Quotes About Environment

places are the same unless your mind changes. There's no magic place to get your mind right. If you feel like shit, everything you see looks like shit. I know that.

In a designed economy there would be no trees, or certainly no very tall trees: no forests, no canopy. Trees are a waste. Trees are extravagant. Tree trunks are standing monuments to futile competition - futile if we think in terms of a planed economy. But the natural economy is not planned. Individual plants compete with other plants, of the same and other species, and the result is that they grow taller and taller, far taller than any planner would recommend.

My untidy habits drive me to follow the slash-and-burn (or Mad Hatter) principle. Work on a virgin table until the mess becomes unbearable, then move on to a clean table in a clean room — or, on a beautiful summer day like this, one of the five tables dotted around the garden. Trash that table and move on again.

Evolution is a trajectory through multidimensional space, in which every step of the way has to represent a body capable of surviving and reproducing about as well as the parental type reached by the preceding step of the trajectory.

To describe the forests of the world as its 'lungs' does no harm, and it might do some good if it encourages people to preserve them. But the rhetoric of holistic harmony can degenerate into a kind of dotty, Prince Charles-style mysticism.

When we talk of a program as 'doing better' or as being 'successful' we are notionally measuring success as capacity to propagate copies of the same program in the next generation: in reality this is likely to mean that a successful program is one which promotes the survival and reproduction of the animal adopting it.

Adoption and contraception, like reading, mathematics, and stress-induced illness, are products of an animal that is living in an environment radically different from the one in which its genes were naturally selected.

The effect of the gene depends on its environment, and this includes other genes. Sometimes a gene has one effect in the presence of a particular other gene, and a completely different effect in the presence of another set of companion genes. The whole set of genes in a body constitutes a kind of genetic climate or background, modifying and influencing the effects of any particular gene.

This is a subtle, complicated idea. It is complicated because the 'environment' of a gene consists largely of other genes, each of which is itself being selected for its ability to cooperate with its environment of other genes.

The genotype may be a 'physiological team', but we do not have to believe that that team was necessarily selected as a harmonious unit in comparison with less harmonious rival units. Rather, each gene was selected because it prospered in its environment, and its environment necessarily included the other genes which were simultaneously prospering in the gene-pool. Genes with complementary 'skills' prosper in each others' presence.

The earliest form of natural selection was simply a selection of stable forms and a rejection of unstable ones.

Evolution is within us, around us, between us, and its workings are embedded in the rocks of eons past.

Animals therefore go to elaborate lengths to find and catch food; to avoid being caught and eaten themselves; to avoid disease and accident; to protect themselves from unfavourable climatic conditions; to find members of the opposite sex and persuade them to mate; and to confer on their children advantages similar to those they enjoy themselves.

It is the effects on the world of successful active germ-line replicators that we see as adaptations.

The long-lived gene as an evolutionary unit is not any particular physical structure but the textual archival information that is copied on down the generations. [I]t is widely distributed in space among different individuals, and widely distributed in time over many generations. [A] successful gene will be one that does well in the environments provided by these other genes that it is likely to meet in lots of different bodies.

Natural selection favours genes that control their survival machines in such a way that they make the best use of their environment. This includes making the best use of other survival machines, both of the same and of different species.

The gene's extended phenotypic effect, say an increase in the height of the dam, affects its chances of survival in precisely the same sense as in the case of a gene with a normal phenotypic effect, such as an increase in the length of the tail.

If two beavers working on the same dam have different genes for dam height, the resulting extended phenotype will reflect the interaction between the genes, in the same way as bodies reflect gene interactions.

I have previously supported the case for a completely non-genetic kind of replicator, which flourishes only in the environment provided by complex, communicating brains. I called it the 'meme' (Dawkins 1976a).

Selection favours those genes which succeed in the presence of other genes, which in turn succeed in the presence of them.

More generally, if living things didn't work actively to prevent it, they would eventually merge into their surroundings, and cease to exist as autonomous beings. That is what happens when they die.

Darwin's 'survival of the fittest' is really a special case of a more general law of survival of the stable.

Natural selection is anything but random.

I imagined a world of the future as a barren sameness in which everyone had gorged so much fish that no more remained, & where Science knew absolutely every species and phylum & genus, but no-one knew love because it had disappeared along with the fish