George Wald Quotes

We're not the best, but we happen to be what evolution came up with.

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.

Natural selection operates according to immediate cirumstances and not toward a long-term goal. Homo sapiens did eventually evolve as a descendant of the first humans, but there was nothing inevitable about it.

There's nothing nonsensical about saying that what would evolve if Darwinian selection has its head is something that you don't want to happen. And I could easily imagine trying to go against Darwinism.

Evolution works by selection, not by instruction. There is no final cause, no teleology, no purpose guiding the overall process

This preservation of favourable variations and the destruction of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest. Variations neither useful nor injurious would not be affected by natural selection and would be left a fluctuating element.

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

Evolution is a tinkerer.

Chance alone is at the source of all novelty, all creation in the biosphere.

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

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

Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution—paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce.

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

Your creatures can come into being only, like shoot from stem, as part of an endlessly renewed process of evolution.

Natural selection is not the wind which propels the vessel, but the rudder which, by friction, now on this side and now on that, shapes the course.

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.

I am a big believer of what Darwin discovered in the Galapagos, proving that the species most responsive to change will survive over apparently stronger or more intelligent competitors.

Mutation is random; natural selection is the very opposite of random.

People will say, "You're never going to convince me that something as complicated as an eye could come about by sheer chance." And the answer is that natural selection is the very opposite of sheer chance. Natural selection is a non-random process.

That's evolution. Evolution's always hard. Hard and bleak. No such thing as happy evolution

Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences, has no purpose in view. Yet the living results of natural selection overwhelmingly impress us with the appearance of design as if by a master watchmaker, impress us with the illusion of design and planning.

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.

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

I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term Natural Selection, in order to mark its relation to man's power of selection. But the expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient.

As some species die out, forms better adapted to utilize the obstacles against which they struggled in vain come into being.