Quotes About Adaptation

An ESS is stable, not because it is particularly good for the individuals participating in it, but simply because it is immune to treachery from within.

Darwin himself said as much: 'If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.' Darwin could find no such case, and nor has anybody since Darwin's time, despite strenuous, indeed desperate, efforts. Many candidates for this holy grail of creationism have been proposed. None has stood up to analysis.

Dan Nilsson even remarks of compound eyes that 'It is only a small exaggeration to say that evolution seems to be fighting a desperate battle to improve a basically disastrous design.

One gene may be regarded as a unit that survives through a large number of successive individual bodies.

If there are versions of the evolution theory that deny slow gradualism, and deny the central role of natural selection, they may be true in particular cases. But they cannot be the whole truth, for they deny the very heart of the evolution theory, which gives it the power to dissolve astronomical improbabilities and explain prodigies of apparent miracle.

The earliest form of natural selection was simply a selection of stable forms and a rejection of unstable ones. There is no mystery about this. It had to happen by definition.

So, the question is: If greenflies and elm trees don't do it, why do the rest of us go to such lengths to mix our genes up with somebody else's before we make a baby? It does seem an odd way to proceed. Why did sex, that bizarre perversion of straightforward replication, ever arise in the first place? What is the good of sex?*

Perhaps Islam is analogous to a carnivorous gene complex, Buddhism to a herbivorous one.

They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.

We have now also seen that, in precisely the same sense as it is ever possible to talk of a gene 'for' a behaviour pattern, it is possible to talk of a gene, in one organism, 'for' a behaviour pattern (or other phenotypic characteristic) in another organism.

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

Replicator selection is the process by which some replicators survive at the expense of other replicators. Vehicle selection is the process by which some vehicles are more successful than other vehicles in ensuring the survival of their replicators

bizarre example of what appears to be a Tit for Tat arrangement in nature was discovered by Eric Fischer in a hermaphrodite fish, the sea bass.

The controversy about group selection versus individual selection is a controversy about the rival claims of two suggested kinds of vehicle.

Evolution is the process by which some genes become more numerous and others less numerous in the gene pool.

The ESS has been rigorously defined (Maynard Smith 1974), but it can be crudely encapsulated as a strategy that is successful when competing with copies of itself.

If a program or strategy is successful, this means that copies of it will tend to become more numerous in the population of programs and will ultimately become almost universal. It will therefore come to be surrounded by copies of itself. If it is to remain universal, therefore, it must be successful when competing against copies of itself, successful compared with rare different strategies that might arise by mutation or invasion.

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 point about recurrent reproduction life cycles, and hence, by implication, the point about organisms, is that they allow repeated returns to the drawing board during evolutionary time.

It is these phenotypic effects that we see as adaptations to survival. When we ask whose survival they are adapted to ensure, the fundamental answer has to be not the group, nor the individual organism, but the relevant replicators themselves.

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

Should we then not expect lions to refrain from killing antelopes, 'for the good of the mammals'? Surely they should hunt birds or reptiles instead

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