Quotes About Selection

what they want for dinner or spot another person in the

Our habits and our institutions, from language to cities, are constantly changing, and the mechanism of change turns out to be surprisingly Darwinian: it is gradual, undirected, mutational, inexorable, combinatorial, selective and in some vague sense progressive.

Humanity is experiencing an extraordinary burst of evolutionary change, driven by good old-fashioned Darwinian natural selection. But it is selection among ideas, not among genes. The habitat in which these ideas reside consists of human brains.

A species that over many generations repeatedly exposes itself to some experience will eventually find its offspring selected for a genetic predisposition to cope with that experience. Why?

We are perforce in some sense constrained, goaded, or at least affected by the accumulated impact of selective decisions made over thousands of generations.

It makes more sense to see the body as serving the needs of the genes than vice versa. Bottom–up.

It follows a narrative, going from one stage to the next; it creeps rather than jumps; it has its own spontaneous momentum, rather than being driven from outside; it has no goal or end in mind; and it largely happens by trial and error – a version of natural selection.

Only towards the edge of its range, on an isolated island, or in a remote valley or on a lonely hill top, does natural selection occasionally cause part of a species to morph into something different

Suppose, for instance, that a gene appeared on the X chromosome that specified the recipe for a lethal poison that killed only sperm carrying Y chromosomes. A man with such a gene would have no fewer children than another man. But he would have all daughters and no sons.

There are few clearings in an elm forest and few vacancies on an oyster bed. Each vacancy will attract many thousands of applicants in the form of new seeds or larvae. Therefore, it does not matter that your young are good enough to survive. What matters is whether they are the very best. Sex gives variety, so sex makes a few of your offspring exceptional and a few abysmal, whereas asex makes them all average.

in the matter of choosing mates, males are usually after quantity and females after quality.

Different versions of genes rise and fall in popularity driven often by the rise and fall of diseases. There is a regrettable human tendency to exaggerate stability, to believe in equilibrium.

The sex that invests most in rearing the young—by carrying a fetus for nine months in its belly, for example—is the sex that makes the least profit from an extra mating. The sex that invests the least has time to spare to seek other mates. Therefore, broadly speaking, males invest less and seek quantity of mates, while females invest more and seek quality of mates.

To distinguish between the curved and the straight. —Horace (ca. 30 B.C.)

We've become a nation of Frankensteins, and our monster is us. With everyone working so hard at altering their facades, we no longer have natural selection. We have unnatural selection.

You want to go back to my house the long way? he asked. Or the shortcut? You have to be cold- Long way, I replied. The long way, for sure.

all claim to an individual taste is bad taste

She said Purdue looked at data and everything with their computers, and hand-picked targets like Lee County that were gold mines.

One-fourth of humanity must be eliminated from the social body. We are in charge of God's selection process for planet Earth. He selects, we destroy. We are the riders of the pale horse, Death.

ECONOMISTS POINT OUT THAT THE QUALITY OF ANY GIVEN OPTION can not be assessed in isolation from its alternatives. One of the "costs" of any option involves passing up the opportunities that a different option would have afforded. This is referred to as an opportunity cost.

Apparently we always think we want choice, but when we actually get it, we may not like it. Meanwhile, the need to chose in ever more aspects of life causes us more distress than we realize.

So to make the task of lowering expectations easier: Reduce the number of options you consider. Be a satisficer rather than a maximizer. Allow for serendipity.

Bottom line—the options we consider usually suffer from comparison with other options.

WE'VE SEEN THAT AS THE NUMBER OF OPTIONS UNDER CONSIDERATION goes up and the attractive features associated with the rejected alternatives accumulate, the satisfaction derived from the chosen alternative will go down.