Harvey V. Fineberg Quotes

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

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

Nature favors those organisms which leave the environment in better shape for their progeny to survive.

There's a misconception that survival of the fittest means survival of the most aggressive. The adjective 'Darwinian' used to refer to ruthless competition; you used to read that in business journals. But that's not what Darwinian means to a biologist; it's whatever leads to reproductive success.

Natural selection is anything but random.

Survival, in the cool economics of biology, means simply the persistence of one's own genes in the generations to follow.

Is there a better example of natural selection in action than 'Project Runway?'

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

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.

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.

Evolution favors the survival of the wisest.

As natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection.

It cannot but happen?that those will survive whose functions happen to be most nearly in equilibrium with the modified aggregate of external forces? This survival of the fittest implies multiplication of the fittest.

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.

The fittest survive. What is meant by the fittest? Not the strongest; not the cleverest - weakness and stupidity everywhere survive. There is no way of determining fitness except in that a thing does survive. 'Fitness,' then, is only another name for 'survival.' Darwinism: That survivors survive.

This survival of the fittest implies multiplication of the fittest.

In true natural selection, if a body has what it takes to survive, its genes automatically survive because they are inside it. So the genes that survive tend to be, automatically, those genes that confer on bodies the qualities that assist them to survive.

For the source of any characteristic so widespread and uniform as this adaptation to environment we must go back to the very beginning of the human race.

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

Evolution acts slowly. Our psychological characteristics today are those that promoted reproductive success in the ancestral environmen.

The reason for natural selection's great success is that it provides a satisfying explanation of how evolution might have occurred: individual organisms vary, and if those variations are inherited, the successful ones will survive and propagate and pass down their desirable traits to succeeding generations.

It was a shock to people of the nineteenth century when they discovered, from observations science had made, that many features of the biological world could be ascribed to the elegant principle of natural selection.

If I were a worm, I would rather be the long-lived mutant than the normal worm, that's for sure.

If you take a more Darwinian point of view the dynamics of the universe are such that as the universe evolved in time, complex systems arose out of the natural dynamics of the universe.