Quotes About Mutation

A stick insect looks like a replicator, in that we may lay out a sequence consisting of daughter, granddaughter, great-granddaughter, etc., in which each appears to be a replica of the preceding one in the series. But suppose a flaw or blemish appears somewhere in the chain, say a stick insect is unfortunate enough to lose a leg. The blemish may last for the whole of her lifetime, but it is not passed on to the next link in the chain.

What makes a gene good? As a first approximation I said that what makes a gene good is the ability to build efficient survival machines—bodies. We must now amend that statement. The gene pool will become an evolutionarily stable set of genes, defined as a gene pool that cannot be invaded by any new gene.

Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators

Natural selection is anything but random.

The unique nature about the influenza virus is its great potential for changes, for mutation.

All evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence... I had to place myself amidst the variation.

The only thing constantly changing is change, and change is always changing for the worse.

I was just reading some poetry, and it talked about how things start as one thing and change into another, and I just thought, what a great concept for a song.

There is nothing in this world constant but inconstancy.

Don't try it," he said. The mutant was reading my mind. "You, boy, you're a literary trainspotter...

a population of replicators subject to variation (for instance by imperfect copying) will be taken over by those variants that are better than their rivals at causing themselves to be replicated.

el mal no desaparece, tan sólo se transforma adoptando otras formas de vida.

What did turtles evolve from? Really, I want to know. And for God's sake, don't say lizards, because turtles are nothing like lizards. They could not be more different.

I declare that The Beatles are mutants.

For the first time in history, we can track the evolution of a pandemic in real-time... Influenza viruses are notorious for their rapid mutation and unpredictable behaviour.

Murphy's face went through several mutations as he spoke, as if small animals were scurrying about just beneath his skin.

Although really society should not change, it should mutate. And, little by little, it is mutating... ... Society is like the body of a chicken: the chicken's foot is hard and insensitive while the eye is very alive. And there are beings who embody the cells of the eyes and others who embody the cells of the feet, of the wings, or of the anus.

Pretty much every plant and animal alive today is the result of eons of natural cross-breeding.

You don't just magically flip some evolutionary switch somewhere and transmute a quadruped into an upright-walking bipedal human.

How much can you change and get away with it, before you turn into someone else, before it's some kind of murder?

Josie suffers from a very rare disease, he said. It's caused by a genetic mutation. But the good news is that researchers are working on a gene therapy that could correct the mutation. It's still in the experimental stage, but there's a good chance it'll work. If it does, Josie could be cured. And I wondered, as I often did these days, whether Artificial Friends could help with such work.

One more thing about evolution. They keep saying that it's chance, all chance, and that it's simple. Billions of fish kept

In other words, HIV hasn't happened to humanity just once. It has happened at least a dozen times—a dozen that we know of, and probably many more times in earlier history.

The basic point is so important I'll repeat it: RNA viruses mutate profligately.