Quotes About Natural

Far from pointing to a designer, the illusion of design in the living world is explained with far greater economy and with devastating elegance by Darwinian natural selection

algorithm of natural selection has generated a machine capable of internalizing the algorithm, setting up a model of itself – and much more – in microcosm inside the human skull.

A gene is defined as any portion of chromosomal material that potentially lasts for enough generations to serve as a unit of natural selection.

The gene is a long-lived replicator, existing in the form of many duplicate copies. It is not infinitely long-lived. Even a diamond is not literally everlasting, and even a cistron can be cut in two by crossing-over. The gene is defined as a piece of chromosome which is sufficiently short for it to last, potentially, for long enough for it to function as a significant unit of natural selection.

How did ears get their start? Any piece of skin can detect vibrations if they come in contact with vibrating objects. This is a natural outgrowth of the sense of touch. Natural selection could easily have enhanced this faculty by gradual degrees until it was sensitive enough to pick up very slight contact vibrations. At this point it would automatically have been sensitive enough to pick up airborne vibrations of sufficient loudness and/or sufficient nearness of origin

Once the vital ingredient—some kind of genetic molecule—is in place, true Darwinian natural selection can follow, and complex life emerges as the eventual consequence.

Germ-line replicators, then, are units that actually survive or fail to survive, the difference constituting natural selection.

Leaders who forbid their followers to use effective contraceptive methods express a preference for 'natural' methods of population limitation, and a natural method is exactly what they are going to get. It is called starvation.

Those people who leap from personal bafflement at a natural phenomenon straight to a hasty invocation of the supernatural are no better than the fools who see a conjuror bending a spoon and leap to the conclusion that it is 'paranormal'.

Incidentally, I'm puzzled why, with so much oxygen about, things didn't burst into flames all the time. Perhaps they did

although evolution may seem, in some vague sense, a 'good thing', especially since we are the product of it, nothing actually 'wants' to evolve.

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.

If the phenotypic change in the artefact had an influence on the success of replication of the new gene, natural selection would act, positively or negatively, to change the probability of similar artefacts existing in the future.

Those people who leap from personal bafflement at a natural phenomenon straight to a hasty invocation of the supernatural are no better than the fools who see a conjuror bending a spoon and leap to the conclusion that it is 'paranormal'.

Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose. Physics is the study of simple things that do not tempt us to invoke design.

Evolution is something that happens, willy-nilly, in spite of all the efforts of the replicators (and nowadays of the genes) to prevent it happening.

The point is the obvious one that selection at any one locus is not independent of selection at other loci.

It comes from natural selection: the process which, as far as we know, is the only process ultimately capable of generating complexity out of simplicity.

Good' genes are blindly selected as those that survive in the gene pool.

If human breeders can transform a wolf into a Pekinese, or a wild cabbage into a cauliflower, in just a few centuries or millennia, why shouldn't the non-random survival of wild animals and plants do the same thing over millions of years?

All life, all intelligence, all creativity and all 'design' anywhere in the universe, is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection. It follows that design comes late in the universe, after a period of Darwinian evolution. Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.

I would far prefer to have things happen as they naturally do, such as the mousse refusing to leave the mold, the potatoes sticking to the skillet, the apple charlotte slowly collapsing. One of the secrets of cooking is to learn to correct something if you can, and bear with it if you cannot.

Jesus' healings are not supernatural miracles in a natural world. They are the only truly 'natural' things in a world that is unnatural, demonized and wounded.

Empathy is also a natural human behavior, and natural to chimps as well. When we see someone hurt, our brains respond to some extent as if we'd been hurt ourselves.