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Natural Quotes

“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.”

World Natural Practice Materials Theory Evolution Bases Structure Agriculture Adaptation Theory Of Evolution Causation

Book:Soviet Biology: Report to the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences

Source: Soviet Biology: Report to the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences

“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.”

“Darwinian natural selection only yields adaptation to changing local environments, and better function in an immediate habitat might just as well be achieved by greater simplicity in form and behavior as by ever-increasing complexity.”

Wells Might Form Natural Environment Greater Behavior Function Simplicity Locals Complexity Yield Selection Adaptation Natural Selection Habitat Natural Habitats

Book:Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

Source: Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

“Natural selection is just three factors - over-production, variation, and inheritance combined to produce adaptation to changing local environments. It's not a principle or progress; it's just a principle of local adaptation. You don't make better creatures in any cosmic sense; you make creatures that are better suited to the changing climates of their local habitats.”

Three Natural Principles Environment Progress Produce Creatures Climate Productions Locals Factors Cosmic Selection Adaptation Inheritance Variation Natural Selection Habitat

Author:Stephen Jay Gould

“What an odd time to be a fundamentalist about adaptation and natural selection - when each major subdiscipline of evolutionary biology has been discovering other mechanisms as adjuncts to selection's centrality.”

Has Beens Natural Majors Odd Biology Mechanism Discovering Selection Adaptation Natural Selection Fundamentalist Evolutionary Biology

Author:Stephen Jay Gould

“Natural selection is a theory of local adaptation to changing environments. It proposes no perfecting principles, no guarantee of general improvement”

Natural Principles Environment Theory Improvement Locals Guarantees Selection Adaptation Propose Natural Selection Changing Environment

Book:Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History

Source: Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History

“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.”

“We're facing enormous changes in our planetary life, with climate change and the adaptations that all natural systems are going to have to make to these climate changes, and so it's extremely important to bear witness to what's happening.”

Important Natural Bears Happenings Climate Climate Change Enormous Witness Adaptation

Author:Alison Hawthorne Deming