John Dewey Quotes

It's like the animal kingdom. Adapt or go extinct.

In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment.

Natural selection is anything but random.

This fundamental subject of Natural Selection will be treated at some length in the fourth chapter; and we shall then see how Natural Selection almost inevitably causes much Extinction of the less improved forms of life and induces what I have called Divergence of Character.

Everything has to evolve or else it perishes.

Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress.

The history of life is a tale of decimation and later stabilization of few surviving anatomies, not a story of steady expansion and progress.

I'm here as a product of process of evolution, which doesn't make very many exceptions. And which rates life relatively cheaply.

In the game of life, less diversity means fewer options for change. Wild or domesticated, panda or pea, adaptation is the requirement for survival.

Why is it not just as likely that there were as many small general nearly at first as now, and as great a disproportion in the number of their species?

Whatever the life form, evolution selects for economy of resources.

Very few species have survived unchanged. There's one called lingula, which is a little shellfish, a little brachiopod about the size of my fingernail, that has survived for 500 million years, but it's survived by being unobtrusive and doing nothing, and you can't accuse human beings of that.

Natural selection eliminates and maybe maintains, but it doesn't create.

Animals can adapt to problems and make inventions, but often no faster than natural selection can do its work - the world acts as its own simulator in the case of natural selection.

Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature's inexorable imperative.

I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term Natural Selection.

Evan Mecham proves that Darwin was wrong.

Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability

If death weren't around to 'finalize' the Darwinian process, we'd all still be amoebas.

I have always had this basic biological question in terms of evolution, if the drive to evolution is to like survive. An organism that survives well, there is really no need for consciousness in there.

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.

Most species do their own evolving, making it up as they go along, which is the way Nature intended.

The secrets of evolution are death and time-the deaths of enormous numbers of lifeforms that were imperfectly adapted to the environment; and time for a long succession of small mutations.

Most species do their own evolving, making it up as they go along, which is the way Nature intended. And this is all very natural and organic and in tune with mysterious cycles of the cosmos, which believes that there's nothing like millions of years of really frustrating trial and error to give a species moral fiber and, in some cases, backbone.

Evolution doesn't care about what makes sense; it cares about what works