Quotes About Adaptation

The progress of science, like an ancient desert trail, is strewn with the bleached skeletons of discarded theories, doctrines, and axioms which seemed to possess eternal life.

It is sometimes easier to circumvent prevailing difficulties [in science] rather than to attack them.

Computer Science is the only discipline in which we view adding a new wing to a building as being maintenance.

Unless you expect the unexpected you will never find it, for it is hard to discover and hard to attain.

The chief business of seventeenth-century philosophy was to reckon with seventeenth-century science... the chief business of twentieth-century philosophy is to reckon with twentieth-century history.

Change is the principal feature of our age and literature should explore how people deal with it. The best science fiction does that, head-on.

Every student who enters upon a scientific pursuit, especially if at a somewhat advanced period of life, will find not only that he has much to learn, but much also to unlearn.

Man not only survives and functions in his environment, he shapes it and he is shaped by it.

Most of the programmers in ten years will be us, and we won't get much smarter.

Science advances funeral by funeral

Pop science goes flying off in all kinds of fashionable directions, and it often drags a lot of SF writers with it. I've been led astray like that myself at times.

If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change.

Follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.

Both of these branches of evolutionary science, are, in my opinion, in the closest causal connection; this arises from the reciprocal action of the laws of heredity and adaptation.

We will now discuss in a little more detail the Struggle for Existence.

Two-thirds of all preachers, doctors and lawyers are hanging on to the coat tails of progress, shouting, whoa! while a good many of the rest are busy strewing banana peels along the line of march.

The most satisfactory definition of man from the scientific point of view is probably Man the Tool-maker.

Natural selection is not the wind which propels the vessel, but the rudder which, by friction, now on this side and now on that, shapes the course.

By the usual reckoning, the worst books make the best films.

It's very strange writing science fiction in a world that moves as fast as ours does.

There are two ways in which a science develops; in response to problems which is itself creates, and in response to problems that are forced on it from the outside.

Twenty years ago many chemists would have defended the theory of bond arms as a satisfactory explanation because they had become accustomed to thinking of it as unique and as ultimate.

Homologue. The same organ in different animals under every variety of form and function.

PROBOSCIS, n. The rudimentary organ of an elephant which serves him in place of the knife-and-fork that Evolution has as yet denied him. For purposes of humor it is popularly called a trunk.