P. J. O'Rourke Quotes

This fundamental subject of Natural Selection will be treated at some length in the fourth chapter; and we shall then see how Natural Selection almost inevitably causes much Extinction of the less improved forms of life and induces what I have called Divergence of Character.

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

If evolution is outlawed, only outlaws will evolve.

The tree of life was always there. Evolution just fills in the gaps.

The secrets of evolution are death and time-the deaths of enormous numbers of lifeforms that were imperfectly adapted to the environment; and time for a long succession of small mutations.

Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me. This is easy to write, easy to read, and hard to believe.

Natural selection operates according to immediate cirumstances and not toward a long-term goal. Homo sapiens did eventually evolve as a descendant of the first humans, but there was nothing inevitable about it.

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

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.

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.

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

Natural selection is not evolution.

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

We are the product of 4.5 billion years of fortuitous, slow biological evolution. There is no reason to think that the evolutionary process has stopped. Man is a transitional animal. He is not the climax of creation.

Evolution is cleverer than you are.

The Theory of Evolution has had over a million chances to be wrong, but never has been.

We're not the best, but we happen to be what evolution came up with.

Evolution is like walking on a rolling barrel. The walker isn't so much interested in where the barrel is going as he is in keeping on top of it.

Natural selection acts solely by accumulating slight successive favorable variations, it can produce no great or sudden modification; it can act only by very short steps.

Everything has to evolve or else it perishes.

Mutation is random; natural selection is the very opposite of random.

Evolution doesn't care about what makes sense; it cares about what works

As some species die out, forms better adapted to utilize the obstacles against which they struggled in vain come into being.

A grain in the balance will determine which individual shall live and which shall die - which variety or species shall increase in number, and which shall decrease, or finally become extinct.

There's nothing nonsensical about saying that what would evolve if Darwinian selection has its head is something that you don't want to happen. And I could easily imagine trying to go against Darwinism.