Evolutionary Biology Quotes

“Individuals are not stable things, they are fleeting. Chromosomes too are shuffled into oblivion, like hands of cards soon after they are dealt. But the cards themselves survive the shuffling. The cards are the genes. The genes are not destroyed by crossing-over, they merely change partners and march on. Of course they march on. That is their business. They are the replicators and we are their survival machines. When we have served our purpose we are cast aside. But genes are denizens of geological time: genes are forever.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“Different sorts of survival machine appear very varied on the outside and in their internal organs. An octopus is nothing like a mouse, and both are quite different from an oak tree. Yet in their fundamental chemistry they are rather uniform, and, in particular, the replicators that they bear, the genes, are basically the same kind of molecule in all of us—from bacteria to elephants. We are all survival machines for the same kind of replicator—molecules called DNA— but there are many different ways of making a living in the world, and the replicators have built a vast range of machines to exploit them. A monkey is a machine that preserves genes up trees, a fish is a machine that preserves genes in the water; there is even a small worm that preserves genes in German beer mats. DNA works in mysterious ways.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“Prediction in a complex world is a chancy business. Every decision that a survival machine takes is a gamble, and it is the business of genes to program brains in advance so that on average they take decisions that pay off. The currency used in the casino of evolution is survival, strictly gene survival, but for many purposes individual survival is a reasonable approximation.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“The genes supply the motivation for warfare, [E. O.] Wilson is saying, in humans as they do in chimps, but people, blessed with the power of language, look for some objective cause of war. A society psychs itself up to go to war by agreeing that their neighbors have wronged them, whether by seizing property or failing to deliver on some promise. Religious leaders confirm that the local deity favors their cause and off go the troops. ”
― Nicholas Wade

“{On to contributions to evolutionary biology of 18th century French scientist, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon}

He was not an evolutionary biologist, yet he was the father of evolutionism. He was the first person to discuss a large number of evolutionary problems, problems that before Buffon had not been raised by anybody.... he brought them to the attention of the scientific world.

Except for Aristotle and Darwin, no other student of organisms [whole animals and plants] has had as far-reaching an influence.

He brought the idea of evolution into the realm of science. He developed a concept of the "unity of type", a precursor of comparative anatomy. More than anyone else, he was responsible for the acceptance of a long-time scale for the history of the earth. He was one of the first to imply that you get inheritance from your parents, in a description based on similarities between elephants and mammoths. And yet, he hindered evolution by his frequent endorsement of the immutability of species. He provided a criterion of species, fertility among members of a species, that was thought impregnable.”
― Ernst Mayr

“There's no end to evolution.”
― David Almond, Skellig

“Too much tension is a disease; but so is too little. There are certain occasions when we ought to be tense, when an excess of tranquility (and especially of tranquility imposed from the outside, by a chemical) is entirely inappropriate.”
― Aldous Huxley, Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience

“Evolution is all about turning "bugs" into "features", turning "noise" into "signal", and the fuzzy boundaries between these categories are not optional; the opportunistic open-endedness of natural selection depends on them.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds

“Evolution is all about turning "bugs" into "features," turning "noise" into "signal," and the fuzzy boundaries between these categories are not optional; the opportunistic open-endedness of natural selection depends on them.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds

“If you make yourself really small, you can externalize virtually everything.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Freedom Evolves

“As far as nature is concerned, we cannot claim more rights than a chimpanzee. Deal with it ~ Peter Ojo”
― Peter Ojo

“Consider the least stable way to arrange an animal's body: it would be to stand it upright. To seee the biomechanics of a human skeleton walk and run -to stand on one foot and not fall, as most humans can easily do- is to witness a marvel of motion and balance, as robot engineers are learning their cost.
Bipedalism was the enabler of subsequent brain growth.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“Consider the least stable way to arrange an animal's body: it would be to stand it upright. To see the biomechanics of a human skeleton walk and run -to stand on one foot and not fall, as most humans can easily do- is to witness a marvel of motion and balance, as robot engineers are learning their cost.
Bipedalism was the enabler of subsequent brain growth.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“Humans have moved from 'object-assisted' to an 'object-dependent' species, and this has bidirectionally influenced brain development, notably visuospatial integration in the parietl lobes.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“Fear is but memory of our animal past.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Rowdy Scientist: Handbook of Humanitarian Science

“Insecurity is wisdom of the jungle against possible predatory attack.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Rowdy Scientist: Handbook of Humanitarian Science

“Mission is purpose magnified,
Purpose is potential focused,
Potential is protoplasm evolving,
Protoplasm is a pocket universe.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Insan Himalayanoğlu: It's Time to Defect

“While many things that seem useless turn out to have a function, others are abysmal designs. The eye would be better without a blind spot. The birth canal is too narrow. Cancer protection mechanisms are insufficient, as are those that protect against infection. Ability to regulate eating is weak. Anxiety and pain are often excessive.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry

“The greatest boon of modern life is also the greatest villain: the availability of plentiful food. Or, rather, foodlike substances manufacturers concoct with the exact combinations of sugar, salt, and fat that we most desire. Those desires were helpful on the African savanna, where sugar, salt, and fat were scarce; now our preferences make us obese and ill. Addiction to tobacco was not much of a problem until the breeding of milder strains and the invention of cigarette papers; now smoking causes a third of all cancers and much heart disease. Fermented beverages were sometimes available, but now readily available beer, wine, and spirits cause alcoholism worldwide. Advances in chemistry and transport make concentrated drugs such as heroin and amphetamine available everywhere; in combination with novel means of administration such as needles, they cause massive modern epidemics.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry

“Many of our current health problems result, nonetheless, from the environments we have created to satisfy our desires. Most people in developed societies live better now physically than the kings and queens of just a century ago. We have a surfeit of delicious food, protection from the elements, time for leisure, and relief from pain. The accomplishments are spectacular, but they also cause most chronic disease.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry

“Aussi, laissez-moi le répéter, l'évolution est synonyme d'espoir.”
― Theodosius Dobzhansky, Heredity and the Nature of Man

“The great value of the Darwinian evolutionary paradigm is the way it helps us understand how what once was "noise" (e.g., unselected-uncorrelated variation) can become new "signal" under changing circumstances.”
― Terrence Deacon

“We have proven to be enormously successful at adapting. We are now adapting so fast that we can hardly adapt to our adaptation.”
― Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

“In many species, males pay for sex. For example, among black ticked hanging flies, an amorous male will present a female with a nice, juicy insect and then copulate with her while she distractedly enjoys her meal. If the female finishes before he does, she simply walks away. Game over. If, on the other hand, he finishes first, he snatches the insect away and tries to woo another female with the leftovers.”
― Steve Stewart-Williams, The Ape that Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve

“The general rule is that whatever females want, males evolve to provide it.”
― Steve Stewart-Williams, The Ape that Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve

“Karl Marx suggested that people should produce according to their abilities but share according to their needs, and this maxim describes hunter-gatherers reasonably well. But the history of communism suggests that agricultural people don’t share very well outside their family. The problem with the Marxist utopia is that people can free-ride on the efforts of others. If you are required to share with me, then I’m tempted to put in a little less effort because I know your hard work will leave me well fed. Once you see me slacking off, you don’t want to be a sucker, so you slack off a bit yourself, and pretty soon everyone is barely working. The free-rider problem is a vicious circle and can quickly destroy a productive community if there is no way to police everyone’s contribution.”
― William Von Hippel, The Social Leap: The New Evolutionary Science of Who We Are, Where We Come From, and What Makes Us Happy

“True. And there are an infinite number of universes, of course, in which we don't exist at all - that is, no creatures similar to us exist at all. In which the human race doesn't exist at all. There are an infinite number of universes, for instance, in which flowers are the predominant form of life -or in which no form of life has ever developed or will develop.”
― Fredric Brown, "FREDRIC BROWN" BOOKS: What Mad Universe / Space on My Hands / Honeymoon in Hell

“At the same time, animals that are very cognitively complex tend to have a slow development (although there are exceptions to this, such as the common octopus, whose life expectancy in the wild barely surpasses one year, and yet they are exceedingly smart).”
― Susana Monsó, Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death

“Are we all urns of the same comet’s ☄️ ruins.
Or
Successors of the same tree growing in different soils ”
― Dr. Anhad Kaur Suri

“Scientists who oppose evolution ask: What further evidence is needed to prove that evolution and the spontaneous origin of life is just a story? Since the 1950s, universities from around the world have performed thousands of experiments and spent millions of dollars in an attempt to produce life from non-life. Despite large degrees of scientific intervention and use of sophisticated laboratory equipment, the work thus far has produced nonfunctional fragments of DNA, proteinoids (but not proteins), and a poisonous mixture of amino acids. Not one living organism has been formed in the laboratory using a mixture of chemicals. If the top scientists from around the world cannot demonstrate that life formed spontaneously, then the theory of evolution is, for all practical purposes, dead.”
― Carl Werner, Evolution: The Grand Experiment: The Quest for an Answer, Volume 1