Quotes About Adaptation

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.

evolutionarily stable strategy, an idea that he traces back to W. D. Hamilton and R. H. MacArthur. A 'strategy' is a pre-programmed behavioural policy. An example of a strategy is: 'Attack opponent; if he flees pursue him; if he retaliates run away.

Any creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design anything, comes into existence only as the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution.

It seems to follow from the thesis of this book that there is no important distinction between our 'own' genes and parasitic or symbiotic insertion sequences. Whether they conflict or cooperate will depend not on their historical origins but on the circumstances from which they stand to gain now.

Any effect that a meme has on the behaviour of a body bearing it may influence that meme's chance of surviving.

We live on a planet where we are surrounded by perhaps ten million species, each one of which independently displays a powerful illusion of apparent design. Each species is well fitted to its particular way of life.

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.

All life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities

If the organism is not a replicator, what is it? The answer is that it is a communal vehicle for replicators. A vehicle is an entity in which replicators (genes and memes) travel about, an entity whose attributes are affected by the replicators inside it, an entity which may be seen as a compound tool of replicator propagation.

Our mental burka window is narrow because it didn't need to be any wider in order to assist our ancestors to survive.

Always devise your rules as if you didn't know whether you were going be at the top or the bottom of the pecking order.

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?

Bir ça??n dini, bir sonrakinin edebi eÄŸlencesidir. Ralph Waldo

Each gene works in a world of phenotypic consequences of other genes. Some of those other genes will be members of the same genome. Others will be members of the same gene-pool operating through other bodies. Yet others may be members of different gene-pools, different species, different phyla.

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

Survival machines that can simulate the future are one jump ahead of survival machines who can only learn on the basis of overt trial and error.

Earlier than about 10,000 years ago, all human populations were hunter gatherers. Soon, probably none will be. Those not extinct will be 'civilised' — or corrupted, depending on your point of view.

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.

A branch of one of the cranial nerves, the recurrent laryngeal runs from the brain to the larynx. It doesn't go straight there, however. Instead, it dives down into the chest, loops around one of the main arteries leaving the heart, and proceeds back up the neck to the larynx. In a giraffe the detour is significant (British understatement) and it is presumably costly. The explanation lies in history, in the nerve's emergence in our fish ancestors before a discernible neck evolved.

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

Could it have been the drawing of maps that boosted our ancestors beyond the critical threshold which the other apes just failed to cross?