Isaac Asimov Quotes
Intelligence is an accident of evolution, and not necessarily an advantage.
Asimov, Isaac. The Roving Mind. Prometheus Books, 1983.
While there is a random element to evolution in that mutantations are constantly being created, natural selectioney off provides a countervailing factor. Most of the mutations do not survive as they offer no advantage to the species welfare and survival. Only those that do live on and improve the species for a particular enviornment.
Darwin believed at the time that large populations were critical to national success and development. The next 100 years would prove that large population was a handicap to progress and real growth of standard of living.
Charles Darwin did not develop an interest in the origin of life in a vacuum. His grandfather and many other scientists and naturalists had realized that species evolved and improved over time and generations. What Charles Darwin added was the principles of the mechanism of how it all worked.
Fisher, a brilliant scientist and mathematician, engaged in some major blunders like denying that tobacco had any relationship to lung cancer and other disease. This was another. His “conclusion” that the more “successful” members of society should breed in preference to the less successful. There are three major fallacies in his argument and that of other eugenics supporters other than the obvious ethical and moral problems. First, human success in any society is determined by both genetic and environmental factors. In general, it is currently impossible to know who the successful would be if environmental factors were equal. Second, our concept of success is quite narrow from an evolutionary point of view. The most successful humans might be those who produce that most children, or those who extend man’s habitat, or those who will be most resistant to a pandemic that will arise in the near future. Third, by the standards of much of English society at the time, the most “successful” people were the monarchy and heredity aristocracy, There was already too much inbreeding in these groups and increasing this groups breeding rather than others would not only weaken the species over time, but would limit the variation that is necessary for natural selection and further evolution of the human species.
Isaac Asimov was an American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University. He was known for his works of science fiction and popular science. Asimov was a prolific writer, and wrote or edited more than 500 books. He also wrote an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards.
