Nina Fedoroff Quotes

If we didn't have genetic mutations, we wouldn't have us. You need error to open the door to the adjacent possible.

Humans are mutants, everything's a mutant - things that evolve.

Heredity provides for the modification of its own machinery.

We find all kinds of species that have taken up a second chromosome or a third one from somewhere, adding thousands of new traits in a second to that species. So, people who think of evolution as just one gene changing at a time have missed much of biology.

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

Organisms by their design are not made to adapt too far.

Where we are going as a species is a big question. Human evolution certainly hasn't stopped. Every time individuals produce a new zygote, there's a reshuffling and recombination of genes. And we don't know where all of that is going to take us.

Evolution - evolutionary change - does not happen quickly.

New gene pools are generated in every generation, and evolution takes place because the successful individuals produced by these gene pools give rise to the next generation.

Our genomes are evolving and changing every single day.

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

The capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel of DNA. Without this special attribute, we would still be anaerobic bacteria and there would be no music.

Mutations are exciting, there aren't nearly enough of them.

The great mystery of adaptation is that true fidelity can only be achieved through lavish promiscuity.

Simple DNA gradually morphed and evolved, so that you had the coming into being of ever more complex and diverse creatures, until one day you wake up and find there are peacocks and giraffes. Nature is an open-ended experiment based on morphing a DNA code, and ours is an open-ended experiment based on morphing a crochet code.

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 theory of founder effects does not explain how novel features like plumage traits arise.

The problem with the gene pool is that there's no lifeguard.

In the game of life, less diversity means fewer options for change. Wild or domesticated, panda or pea, adaptation is the requirement for survival.

There's almost no food that isn't genetically modified. Genetic modification is the basis of all evolution. Things change because our planet is subjected to a lot of radiation, which causes DNA damage, which gets repaired, but results in mutations, which create a ready mixture of plants that people can choose from to improve agriculture.

It used to be thought that our genes were historically immutable and that it was not possible to imagine a conversation between culture and genetics.

Natural selection will not remove ignorance from future generations.

As a consequence, geneticists described evolution simply as a change in gene frequencies in populations, totally ignoring the fact that evolution consists of the two simultaneous but quite separate phenomena of adaptation and diversification.

In agriculture, people have taken wild plants that can't be eaten by people - and turned them into wonderful food sources. And that's because genomes can change, and people working with plants have picked mutations. Mutations are nothing more than genetic changes.

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