Shana Alexander Quotes

Evolution is the fundamental idea in all of life science - in all of biology.

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.

With evolution, things are always changing, so I sort of think: Should we all be growing three heads?

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

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

Evolution - evolutionary change - does not happen quickly.

Natural selection is not evolution.

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

What humans can't engineer, evolution can.

Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.

My whole interest is, how do you use evolution as an innovation engine? How does evolution solve new problems that life faces? And to have a system that can create a whole new chemical bond that biology hasn't done before, to me, demonstrates the power of nature to innovate.

Our physiological constitution is obviously a product of Darwinian processes, insofar as you buy the evolutional theory as a generative, as an account of the mechanism that generated us. Our physiology evolved, our behaviors evolved, and our accounts of those behaviors, both successful and unsuccessful, evolved.

Evolution is all about looking forward.

Radiation is one of the important factors in evolution. It causes mutation, and some level of mutation is actually good for evolution.

Evolution is a tinkerer.

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

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.

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.

As a consequence, geneticists described evolution simply as a change in gene frequencies in populations, totally ignoring the fact that evolution consists of the two simultaneous but quite separate phenomena of adaptation and diversification.

Evolution is among the most well-established theories in the scientific community. To doubt it sounds to biologists as absurd as denying relativity does to physicists.

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

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

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.

If evolution is outlawed, only outlaws will evolve.

The more specific idea of Evolution now reached is - a change from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, accompanying the dissipation of motion and integration of matter.