Harvey V. Fineberg Quotes

Natural selection is not evolution.

New gene pools are generated in every generation, and evolution takes place because the successful individuals produced by these gene pools give rise to the next generation.

The fuel for evolution is diversity, with natural selection leading to continuous adaptations and improvements in Nature's handiwork.

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

For me, the level at which natural selection causes the phenomenon of adaptation is the level of the replicator - the gene.

Just like mutations to DNA in biological organisms allow for evolution through natural selection, forking lets us run multiple experiments in parallel where the strongest versions survive.

Natural selection is not an inflammatory phrase; evolution is.

Natural selection certainly operates. It explains how bacteria will gain antibiotic resistance; it will explain how insects get insecticide resistance, but it doesn't explain how you get bacteria or insects in the first place.

First, Darwinian theory tells us how a certain amount of diversity in life forms can develop once we have various types of complex living organisms already in existence.

Natural selection will not remove ignorance from future generations.

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

When a trait is universal, evolutionary biologists look for a genetic explanation and wonder how that gene or genes might enhance survival or reproductive success.

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.

As Darwin himself was at pains to point out, natural selection is all about differential survival within species, not between them.

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

Evolution never looks to the future.

Natural selection may lead to benefits for species, but these 'higher' advantages can only arise as sequelae, or side consequences, of natural selection's causal mechanism: differential reproductive success of individuals.

Evolution is a tinkerer.

There are good reasons why natural selection has become widely accepted as an explanation of evolutionary development. When applied to mammals and other large animals, it fits perfectly. But we cannot assume that all evolutionary steps arise from selection, particularly when looking at smaller animals.

The theory of founder effects does not explain how novel features like plumage traits arise.

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.

The idea that you would affect evolution is a very profound thing.

Evolution is not a force but a process. Not a cause but a law.

Evolution - evolutionary change - does not happen quickly.

The proof of evolution lies in those adaptations that arise from improbable foundations.