Evolution And Adaptation Quotes

“I am suggesting here that organisms have a built-I capability of adapting to their environment. I am suggesting that to the extent that evolution occurs, it occurs at the level of the organism. This suggestion differs sharply from the thesis of the NDT, which holds that evolution occurs only at the level of the population. Organisms contain within themselves the information that enables them to develop a phenotype adaptive to a variety of environments. The adaptation can occur by a change in the genome through a genetic change triggered by the environment, or it can occur without any genetic change.”

— Lee Spetner

“Evolution taught us that adaptation is the key to survival.”

— Gemma Malley

“Phylogenesis is the mechanical cause of ontogenesis.1 In other words, the development of the stem, or race, is, in accordance with the laws of heredity and adaptation, the cause of all the changes which appear in a condensed form in the evolution of the fÅ“tus.”

— Ernst Haeckel

“Maybe hope springs eternal in the whale's heart too. I don't know. If you look at the history of species there seems to be no selective advantage to intelligence. It's the microbes who have totally ignored selection for three and a half billion years that remain with us and probably will remain. They seem almost immortal. The process of evolution appears to be about specialization and adaptation and yet these are the very things that seem ultimately to mediate against survival itself.”

— Cormac McCarthy

“Education must be based on the certainty that faults cannot be atoned for or blotted out, but must always have their consequences. At the same time, there is the other certainty that, through progressive evolution, by slow adaptation to the conditions of environment, they may be transformed.”

— Ellen Key

“As a consequence, geneticists described evolution simply as a change in gene frequencies in populations, totally ignoring the fact that evolution consists of the two simultaneous but quite separate phenomena of adaptation and diversification.”

— Ernst Mayr

“We do not inhabit a perfected world where natural selection ruthlessly scrutinizes all organic structures and then molds them for optimal utility. Organisms inherit a body form and a style of embryonic development; these impose constraints upon future change and adaptation. In many cases, evolutionary pathways reflect inherited patterns more than current environmental demands. These inheritances constrain, but they also provide opportunity. A potentially minor genetic change [ ... ] entails a host of complex, nonadaptive consequences. The primary flexibility of evolution may arise from nonadaptive by-products that occasionally permit organisms to strike out in new and unpredictable directions. What "play" would evolution have if each structure were built for a restricted purpose and could be used for nothing else? How could humans learn to write if our brain had not evolved for hunting, social cohesion, or whatever, and could not transcend the adaptive boundaries of its original purpose?”

— Stephen Jay Gould

“At the Global Crop Diversity Trust, we work to conserve the diversity that will allow the adaptation and evolution of our agricultural crops in the context of climate change and other challenges.”

— Cary Fowler

“Agricultural practice served Darwin as the material basis for the elaboration of his theory of Evolution, which explained the natural causation of the adaptation we see in the structure of the organic world. That was a great advance in the knowledge of living nature.”

— Trofim Lysenko

“What is evolution if not creative adaptation and the progression of our own souls?”

— Terry Tempest Williams

“For me, as a physician, nature's richness is to be studied in the phenomena of health and disease, in endless forms of individual adaptation by which human organisms, people, adapt and reconstruct themselves, faced with the challenges and vicissitudes of life.
Defects, disorders, diseases, in this sense, can play a paradoxical role, by bringing out latent powers, developments, evolutions, forms of life, that might never be seen, or even be imaginable, in their absence. [ ... ] Thus while one may be horrified by the ravages of developmental disorder or disease, one may sometimes see them as creative too-for it they destroy particular paths, particular ways of doing things, they may force the nervous system into making other paths and ways, force on it an unexpected growth and evolution.”

— Oliver Sacks

“We are inescapably the result of a long heritage of learning, adaptation, mutation and evolution, the product of a history which predates our birth as a biological species and stretches back over many thousand millennia ... Going further back, we share a common ancestry with our fellow primates; and going still further back, we share a common ancestry with all other living creatures and plants down to the simplest microbe. The further back we go, the greater the difference from external appearances and behavior patterns which we observe today.”

— Fred Hoyle

“Slow adaptation is driven by forces such as evolution. Fast adaptation is driven by forces such as insight.”

— Gary A. Klein

“Wherever the Net arises, there arises also a rebel to resist human control ... A network nurtures small failures in order that large failures don't happen as often. It is ... fertile ground for learning, adaptation, and evolution ... The only organization capable of unprejudiced growth, or unguided learning, is a network. All other topologies limit what can happen.”

— Kevin Kelly

“A ... difference between most system-building in the social sciences and systems of thought and classification of the natural sciences is to be seen in their evolution. In the natural sciences both theories and descriptive systems grow by adaptation to the increasing knowledge and experience of the scientists. In the social sciences, systems often issue fully formed from the mind of one man. Then they may be much discussed if they attract attention, but progressive adaptive modification as a result of the concerted efforts of great numbers of men is rare.”

— Lawrence Joseph Henderson

“A complete theory of evolution must acknowledge a balance between "external" forces of environment imposing selection for local adaptation and "internal" forces representing constraints of inheritance and development. Vavilov placed too much emphasis on internal constraints and downgraded the power of selection. But Western Darwinians have erred equally in practically ignoring (while acknowledging in theory) the limits placed on selection by structure and development what Vavilov and the older biologists would have called "laws of form.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

“Throughout his last half-dozen books, for example, Arthur Koestler has been conducting a campaign against his own misunderstanding of Darwinism. He hopes to find some ordering force, constraining evolution to certain directions and overriding the influence of natural selection. [ ... ] Darwinism is not the theory of capricious change that Koestler imagines. Random variation may be the raw material of change, but natural selection builds good design by rejecting most variants while accepting and accumulating the few that improve adaptation to local environments.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

“Some evolutionists will protest that we are caricaturing their view of adaptation. After all, do they not admit genetic drift, allometry, and a variety of reasons for nonadaptive evolution?”

— Stephen Jay Gould

“It is an error to imagine that evolution signifies a constant tendency to increased perfection. That process undoubtedly involves a constant remodeling of the organism in adaptation to new conditions; but it depends on the nature of those conditions whether the direction of the modifications effected shall be upward or downward.”

— Thomas Huxley

“The proof given by Wright, that non-adaptive differentiation will occur in small populations owing to "drift," or the chance fixation of some new mutation or recombination, is one of the most important results of mathematical analysis applied to the facts of neo-mendelism. It gives accident as well as adaptation a place in evolution, and at one stroke explains many facts which puzzled earlier selectionists, notably the much greater degree of divergence shown by island than mainland forms, by forms in isolated lakes than in continuous river-systems.”

— Julian Huxley

“I think nobody would claim that random genetic drift is capable of producing adaptation, that is to say the illusion of design. Random genetic drift can't produce wings that are good at flying, or eyes that are good at seeing, or legs that are good at running. But random genetic drift probably is very important in driving evolution at the molecular genetic level.”

— Richard Dawkins