Thomas Huxley Quotes

Most species do their own evolving, making it up as they go along, which is the way Nature intended. And this is all very natural and organic and in tune with mysterious cycles of the cosmos, which believes that there's nothing like millions of years of really frustrating trial and error to give a species moral fiber and, in some cases, backbone.

I think of evolution as an error-making and error-correcting process, and we are constantly learning from experience.

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.

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.

The biological world always seems poised to innovate.

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

The conditions that direct the order of . . . the living world . . . are marked by their persistence in improving the birthright of successive generations.

The fossil record implies trial and error, an inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with an efficient Great Designer (although not with a Designer of a more remote and indirect temperament)

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.

The essence of Darwinism lies in its claim that natural selection creates the fit. Variation is ubiquitous and random in direction. It supplies raw material only. Natural selection directs the course of evolutionary change.

As natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection.

When things get bad enough, then something happens to correct the course. And it's for that reason that I speak about evolution as an error-making and an error-correcting process. And if we can be ever so much better - ever so much slightly better - at error correcting than at error making, then we'll make it.

I am a big believer of what Darwin discovered in the Galapagos, proving that the species most responsive to change will survive over apparently stronger or more intelligent competitors.

Most species do their own evolving, making it up as they go along, which is the way Nature intended.

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 have come to recognize evolution not only as an active process that I am experiencing at the time, but as something I can guide by the choices I make.

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

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.

Evolution works by selection, not by instruction. There is no final cause, no teleology, no purpose guiding the overall process

This survival of the fittest which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr. Darwin has called "natural selection", or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.

Evolution is the secret for the next step.

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

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

For me, the level at which natural selection causes the phenomenon of adaptation is the level of the replicator - the gene.

Nature never makes any blunders, when she makes a fool she means it.