Quotes About Variation

Within each species some individuals leave more surviving offspring than others, so that the inheritable traits (genes) of the reproductively successful become more numerous in the next generation. This is natural selection: the non-random differential reproduction of genes.

it is ultimately these mistakes that make evolution possible.

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.

All life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities

Hard-nosed physicists say that the six knobs were never free to vary in the first place. When we finally reach the long-hoped-for Theory of Everything, we shall see that the six key numbers depend upon each other, or on something else as yet unknown, in ways that we today cannot imagine. The six numbers may turn out to be no freer to vary than is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. It will turn out that there is only one way for a universe to be.

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

Natural selection is anything but random.

Greenie had brought together ingredients for cherry bread. It was a variation on Irish soda bread, baked in a cast-iron skillet with dried cherries and pepitas instead of raisins and caraway seeds. At lunch, she would serve it with a spinach gorgonzola salad (the dressing sweet, to appease Ray) and a veal roast studded, porcupine fashion, with long, thin slivers of garlic, ginger, and chili pepper.

You can put it another way, of course; you always can.

The mechanism of natural selection depends on the survival, not of the strongest, nor the most intelligent, but of the most adaptable.

What becomes of a chain of argument when the links are made of different metals, each with a separate frangibility?

Still, this particular vision of Genevieve Eversea required reconciling with the quiet girl in the morning dress, the moor pony with the determined gait. As though they were not quite the same thing, or were perhaps variations of the same thing, like verb tenses.

There were no state regulations about hairstyles or clothes. It was what everyone else was wearing that determined the rules of the day. And because the range was so narrow, people were always looking out for the tiniest variations. It was a real test of ingenuity to look different and attractive, and yet similar enough to everyone else so that nobody with an accusing finger could pinpoint what exactly was heretical.

Bien, escúchame con calma. Los que sufren vértigo, los drogadictos, los histéricos, los asesinos maniáticos, los sifilíticos, los deficientes mentales…, suponiendo que haya el uno por ciento de cada uno de ellos, sobre el total representarían un veinte por ciento… De ser posible enumerar otras ochenta anormalidades, y por supuesto se puede, se constituiría una prueba estadística de que la humanidad es cien por cien anormal.

Different isn't wrong. It's just different.

If faces were not alike, we could not distinguish men from beasts; if they were not different, we could not tell one man from another.

Only a very dull man spells a word the same way twice.

All men are created unequal.

The aspect of American society is animated, because men and things are always changing; but it is monotonous, because all the changes are alike.

The man of genius whether as artist or thinker requires a mass of accidental variations to select from and a rigidly selective process of attention.

It is not true that men can be divided into absolutely honest persons and absolutely dishonest ones. Our honesty varies with the strain put on it.

All men are forced into one of two categories: those with eleven fingers and those without.

Money is always there but the pockets change.