Frances Arnold Quotes

Evolution, to me, is the best designer of all time.

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

We owe our existence to innovation. Our species exists thanks to four billion years of genetic innovation.

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

There are no shortcuts in evolution.

What humans can't engineer, evolution can.

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.

The beauty of evolution is that it does provide an explanation of how you can get complexity out of simplicity. It does it by slow, gradual degree. At no point are you postulating the sudden coming into existence of a complicated being.

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.

Human evolution, at first, seems extraordinary. How could the process that gave rise to slugs and oak trees and fish produce a creature that can fly to the moon and invent the Internet and cross the ocean in boats?

We know evolution happened because innumerable bits of data from myriad fields of science conjoin to paint a rich portrait of life's pilgrimage.

The difficulty of looking at a system like natural selection if you have any sort of moral sense yourself, is almost what makes it beautiful.

To inquire into the origin of life is like seeking the origin of electrical machinery or the origin of music. Every increase in complexity of arrangement, of form, of substance, leads to new and often incalculable properties.

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

Evolution - evolutionary change - does not happen quickly.

God created a number of possibilities in case some of his prototypes failed - that is the meaning of evolution.

Natural selection is not evolution.

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.

Evolution is fascinating to watch. To me it is the most interesting when one can observe the evolution of a single man.

Theories of evolution must provide for the creative acts which brought such theories into existence.

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

Biologically the species is the accumulation of the experiments of all its successful individuals since the beginning.

Evolution is cleverer than you are.