Neal Stephenson Quotes

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.

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

The packaged food business environment is very Darwinian. You're fighting for survival every year; you evolve and grow or you die. It's really that simple.

If death weren't around to 'finalize' the Darwinian process, we'd all still be amoebas.

Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo---which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn't a stupendous badass was dead.

It's like the animal kingdom. Adapt or go extinct.

That competition and the struggle for existence is the mechanism behind this state of perpetual change.

Journalism is a Darwinian process.

The great thing about the business is how Darwinian it is. We have to swim or die - if you are found wanting over a period of time, you've either got to change what you're doing or find something else to do.

Struggle is the father of all things. It is not by the principles of humanity that man lives or is able to preserve himself above the animal world, but solely by means of the most brutal struggle.

When I see how fast technology is advancing, my mind thinks of evolution and how organisms also have to evolve or adapt in order to, in their case, survive.

And while the law of competition may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it ensures the survival of the fittest in every department.

Very few species have survived unchanged. There's one called lingula, which is a little shellfish, a little brachiopod about the size of my fingernail, that has survived for 500 million years, but it's survived by being unobtrusive and doing nothing, and you can't accuse human beings of that.

With each new day in Africa, a gazelle wakes up knowing he must outrun the fastest lion or perish. At the same time, a lion stirs and stretches, knowing he must outrun the fastest gazelle or starve. It's no different for the human race. Whether you consider yourself a gazelle or a lion, you have to run faster than others to survive.

With all our mastery over the powers of Nature we have adhered to the view that the struggle for existence is a permanent and necessary condition of life.

Ideas percolate. Through natural selection, the best ones survive.

Is there a better example of natural selection in action than 'Project Runway?'

Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature's inexorable imperative.

Adapt or die.

The facts of evolution are clear and are not disputed by any serious scientific worker. The universe is over 11 billion years old, and the earth, in particular, is over 4 billion. That is a fact. Life on earth is at least 2.5 billion years old, and, as new evidence accumulates, the best estimate of the origin of life gets pushed further and further into the past. That too is fact. It is also a fact that there were no mammals or birds 200 million years ago and no vertebrates 600 million years ago, while there are no dinosaurs now. Finally, it is a fact that under con- ditions that have existed on earth for the last billion years, at least, all living organisms arise from previously living organisms. So, the present complex living forms have evolved by an unbroken and continuous process from the simplest living forms of the pre-Cambrian era. To as- sert, on the contrary, that the earth and life on it are a paltry ten or hundred thousand years old and that the complex forms living today arose in an instant from unorganized matter is in contradiction not simply with the corpus of biological knowledge but with all scientific knowl- edge of the physical world. To deny evolution is to deny physics, chemistry, and astronomy, as well as biology

I should premise that I use the term “Struggle for Existence” in a large and Metaphorical Sense, including dependence of one being on another, and including (which is more important) success in leaving progeny.

In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment.

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

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 think competition is the best thing for everyone. Competition is what makes us evolve, from when we were itty bitty little tadpoles in prehistoric times to what we've turned into now. Competition makes us evolve and makes us push ourselves better.