These natural selection quotes will inspire you. Natural selection is the differential survival and reproduction of individuals due to differences in phenotype.
Below you will find a collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging natural selection quotes, natural selection sayings, and natural selection proverbs.
Best Natural Selection Quotes
- “I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection.” ~ Charles Darwin
- “The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity.” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “Let me lay my cards on the table. If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone ever had, I’d give it to Darwin, ahead of even Newton or Einstein and everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law. It is not just a wonderful idea. It is a dangerous idea.” ~ Daniel Dennett
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“Mutation is random; natural selection is the very opposite of random.” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of higher animals, directly follows.” ~ Charles Darwin
- “Darwin’s idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition.” ~ Daniel Dennett , Natural selection quotes Darwin
- “With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. Hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.” ~ Charles Darwin
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“Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal.” ~ Charles Darwin
- “As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities.” ~ Charles Darwin
- “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” ~ Charles Darwin , Natural selection quotes life
- “As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form.” ~ Charles Darwin
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“The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic.” ~ Charles Darwin
- “I am quite sure that our views on evolution would be very different had biologists studied genetics and natural selection before and not after most of them were convinced that evolution had occurred.” ~ John B. S. Haldane
- “When it was first said that the sun stood still and world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei [the voice of the people is the voice of God], as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science.” ~ Charles Darwin
- “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars.” ~ Charles Darwin
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“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” ~ Charles Darwin
- “It is essential for genetic material to be able to make exact copies of itself; otherwise growth would produce disorder, life could not originate, and favourable forms would not be perpetuated by natural selection.” ~ Maurice Wilkins
- “The expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient.” ~ Charles Darwin , Natural selection quotes fittest
- “But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created that a cat should play with mice.” ~ Charles Darwin
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“Great is the power of steady misrepresentation” ~ Charles Darwin
- “I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my father, brother and almost all of my friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.” ~ Charles Darwin
- “A man’s friendships are one of the best measures of his worth.” ~ Charles Darwin
- “I love fools’ experiments. I am always making them.” ~ Charles Darwin
- “Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous.” ~ Barbara Ehrenreich
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“A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.” ~ Charles Darwin
- “We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities… still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.” ~ Charles Darwin
- “The moral faculties are generally esteemed, and with justice, as of higher value than the intellectual powers. But we should always bear in mind that the activity of the mind in vividly recalling past impressions is one of the fundamental though secondary bases of conscience. This fact affords the strongest argument for educating and stimulating in all possible ways the intellectual faculties of every human being.” ~ Charles Darwin
- “Multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.” ~ Charles Darwin
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“Endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved” ~ Charles Darwin
- “It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, wherever and whenever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.” ~ Charles Darwin
- “This survival of the fittest which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr. Darwin has called “natural selection”, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.” ~ Herbert Spencer
- “The essence of Darwinism lies in its claim that natural selection creates the fit. Variation is ubiquitous and random in direction. It supplies raw material only. Natural selection directs the course of evolutionary change.” ~ Stephen Jay Gould
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“Disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but at last it was complete.” ~ Charles Darwin
- “We are moving from unconscious evolution through natural selection to conscious evolution by choice.” ~ Barbara Marx Hubbard
- “What can be more curious than that the hand of a man, formed for grasping, that of a mole for digging, the leg of the horse, the paddle of the porpoise, and the wing of the bat, should all be constructed on the same pattern?” ~ Charles Darwin
- “…I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton.— Let each man hope & believe what he can.—” ~ Charles Darwin
- “Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress.” ~ Charles Darwin
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“Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” ~ Theodosius Dobzhansky
- “I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe, and especially the nature of man, and to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope and believe what he can.” ~ Charles Darwin
- “A republic cannot succeed, till it contains a certain body of men imbued with the principles of justice and honour.” ~ Charles Darwin
- “As some of the lowest organisms, in which nerves cannot be detected, are capable of perceiving light, it does not seem impossible that certain sensitive elements in their sarcode should become aggregated and developed into nerves, endowed with this special sensibility.” ~ Charles Darwin
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“Great is the power of steady misrepresentation; but the history of science shows that fortunately this power does not long endure.” ~ Charles Darwin
- “To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.” ~ Charles Darwin
- “Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability.” ~ Ronald Fisher
- “One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.” ~ Charles Darwin
- “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.” ~ Charles Darwin
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“Natural selection is anything but random.” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection determined the evolution of cultures in the same manner as it did that of species.” ~ Konrad Lorenz
- “As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races.” ~ Charles Darwin
- “Sympathy beyond the confines of man, that is, humanity to the lower animals, seems to be one of the latest moral acquisitions.” ~ Charles Darwin
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“Natural selection is not evolution.” ~ Ronald Fisher
- “Owing to this struggle for life, any variation, however slight and from whatever cause proceeding, if it be in any degree profitable to an individual of any species, in its infinitely complex relationship to other organic beings and to external nature, will tend to the preservation of that individual, and will generally be inherited by its offspring.” ~ Charles Darwin
- “It is easy to specify the individual objects of admiration in these grand scenes; but it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of wonder, astonishment, and devotion, which fill and elevate the mind.” ~ Charles Darwin
- “Why do people believe that there are dangerous implications of the idea that the mind is a product of the brain, that the brain is organized in part by the genome, and that the genome was shaped by natural selection?” ~ Steven Pinker
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“To suppose that the eye could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree” ~ Charles Darwin
- “Professor Eddington has recently remarked that ‘The law that entropy always increases – the second law of thermodynamics – holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of nature’. It is not a little instructive that so similar a law [the fundamental theorem of natural selection] should hold the supreme position among the biological sciences.” ~ Ronald Fisher
- “We may consequently state the fundamental theorem of Natural Selection in the form: The rate of increase in fitness of any organism at any time is equal to its genetic variance in fitness at that time.” ~ Ronald Fisher
- “I think it inevitably follows, that as new species in the course of time are formed through natural selection, others will become rarer and rarer, and finally extinct. The forms which stand in closest competition with those undergoing modification and improvement will naturally suffer most.” ~ Charles Darwin
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“I would give absolutely nothing for the theory of Natural Selection, if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent.” ~ Charles Darwin
- “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.” ~ Charles Darwin
- “The Christians who engaged in infamous persecutions and shameful inquisitions were not evil men but misguided men. The churchmen who felt they had an edict from God to withstand the progress of science, whether in the form of a Copernican revolution or a Darwinian theory of natural selection, were not mischievous men but misinformed men. And so Christ’s words from the cross are written in sharp-edged terms across some of the most inexpressible tragedies of history: ‘They know not what they do’.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
- “Although much remains obscure, and will long remain obscure, … I am convinced that Natural Selection has been the main but not exclusive means of modification.” ~ Charles Darwin
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“I think it can be shown that there is such an unerring power at work in Natural Selection, which selects exclusively for the good of each organic being.” ~ Charles Darwin
- “The human brain became large by natural selection (who knows why, but presumably for good cause). Yet surely most “things” now done by our brains, and essential both to our cultures and to our very survival, are epiphenomena of the computing power of this machine, not genetically grounded Darwinian entities created specifically by natural selection for their current function.” ~ Stephen Jay Gould
- “Natural selection involves no plan, no goal, and no direction — just genes increasing and decreasing in frequency depending on whether individuals with those genes have, relative to other individuals, greater or lesser reproductive success.” ~ Randolph M. Nesse
