Quotes About Adaptation

Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.

To suppose that the eye could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree

The altar cloth of one aeon is the doormat of the next.

Your creatures can come into being only, like shoot from stem, as part of an endlessly renewed process of evolution.

It is not clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value.

The secrets of evolution are death and time-the deaths of enormous numbers of lifeforms that were imperfectly adapted to the environment; and time for a long succession of small mutations.

The crocodile cannot turn its head. Like all science, it must always go forward with all-devouring jaws.

Evolution is no linear family tree, but change in the single multidimensional being that has grown to cover the entire surface of Earth.

Patience is what you need in the Antarctic. Wait-Give wind and tide a chance to change.

Science may carry us to Mars, but it will leave the earth peopled as ever by the inept.

Some folks seem to have descended from the chimpanzee much later than others.

Our passion for learning ... is our tool for survival.

The frying pan you should give to your enemy. Food should not be prepared in fat. Our bodies are adapted to a stone age diet of roots and vegetables.

Traditional science is all about finding shortcuts.

The human mind likes a strange idea as little as the body likes a strange protein and resists it with a similar energy.

The certainties of one age are the problems of the next.

If scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims.

Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress.

For the source of any characteristic so widespread and uniform as this adaptation to environment we must go back to the very beginning of the human race.

A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.

Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability.

The famous balance of nature is the most extraordinary of all cybernetic systems. Left to itself, it is always self-regulated.

In science, the best precept is to alter and exchange our ideas as fast as science moves ahead.

We must alter theory to adapt it to nature, but not nature to adapt it to theory.