Theodosius Dobzhansky Quotes

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

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.

I am quite sure that our views on evolution would be very different had biologists studied genetics and natural selection before and not after most of them were convinced that evolution had occurred.

The neutral zone of selective advantage in the neighbourhood of zero is thus so narrow that changes in the environment, and in the genetic constitution of species, must cause this zone to be crossed and perhaps recrossed relatively rapidly in the course of evolutionary change, so that many possible gene substitutions may have a fluctuating history of advance and regression before the final balance of selective advantage is determined.

I think nobody would claim that random genetic drift is capable of producing adaptation, that is to say the illusion of design. Random genetic drift can't produce wings that are good at flying, or eyes that are good at seeing, or legs that are good at running. But random genetic drift probably is very important in driving evolution at the molecular genetic level.

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.

There may be an evolutionary advantage for schizophrenia genes during famine.

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

Darwin's theory of evolution is a framework by which we understand the diversity of life on Earth. But there is no equation sitting there in Darwin's 'Origin of Species' that you apply and say, 'What is this species going to look like in 100 years or 1,000 years?' Biology isn't there yet with that kind of predictive precision.

At a minimum, in explaining evolutionary pathways through time, the constraints imposed by history rise to equal prominence with the immediate advantages of adaptation.

I was taught over and over again that the accumulation of random mutations led to evolutionary change - led to new species. I believed it until I looked for evidence.

On the ordinary view of each species having been independently created, we gain no scientific explanation.

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.

Real biologists who actually do the research will tell you that they almost never find a phenomenon, no matter how odd or irrelevant it looks when they first see it, that doesn't prove to serve a function. The outcome itself may be due to small accidents of evolution.

I think that my main criticism in that book was directed at the general assumption that adaptation characterizes populations and species, rather than simply the individuals in the populations and species.

If a single cell, under appropriate conditions, becomes a man in the space of a few years, there can surely be no difficulty in understanding how, under appropriate conditions, a cell may, in the course of untold millions of years, give origin to the human race.

Natural selection is anything but random.

When the ancestors of the cheetah first began pursuing the ancestors of the gazelle, neither of them could run as fast as they can today.

I'm looking for all the things that are beneficial in the human genome. Everything that I do is based on a very simple principle: things that are beneficial will spread through populations very quickly.

I am a student of evolution and adaptation.

In our evolutionary narratives, the organism itself often seems to play a passive role: a powerless victim, almost, of changes to its environment or mutations in its genes.

Proteins aren't designed, they're evolved.

Evolution doesn't just look for things that are fun; if it did, we'd know how to fly.

No human can design a good enzyme, yet we are surrounded by them after 3.5 billion years of work by evolution.