natural selection

On IJR

No public IJR answers mention natural selection yet. As people ask about it and share their answers, they'll appear here.

• “What made Darwin’s insight so radical was its reliance upon a natural mechanism to explain the development of species. And intelligent Creator was not required for natural selection to operate. Darwin’s vision was of a dynamic, self-generating process of material change. That process was entirely arbitrary, governed by physical laws and chance.”

• “Natural selection was a brilliant concept, but like many brilliant concepts it assaulted long-cherished ideas and beliefs. It threatened the notion that human beings were a separate and extraordinary species, differing from every other animal on the planet. Taken to its logical conclusion, it demolished the idea that people had been created in God’s image.”

• “The phrase “common descent with modification” sums up the process of evolution because it means that, as descent occurs from common ancestors, so do modifications that cause organisms to be adapted to the environment. Through many observations and experiments, Charles Darwin came to the conclusion that natural selection was the process that made modification—that is, adaptation—possible.”

• “Natural selection tends to sculpt a species to fit its environment and lifestyle and can create new species from existing ones. The end result is the diversity of life classified into the three domains of life.”

• “Here we are after a couple million years of natural selection has produced a race that overpopulates and makes war and dominates and rapes, and you want to know about wisdom! Natural selection doesn’t select for wisdom!”

• “Natural selection. So much of bird life and behaviour—from the bright colours, to the hypnotic or downright peculiar meeting displays, to the songs—revolves around their need to procreate, to demonstrate the fitness of their genes.”

Quotes via Wikiquote (CC BY-SA), each with its original source.