Frances Arnold Quotes

As Darwin himself was at pains to point out, natural selection is all about differential survival within species, not between them.

Evolution is a tinkerer.

Natural selection certainly operates. It explains how bacteria will gain antibiotic resistance; it will explain how insects get insecticide resistance, but it doesn't explain how you get bacteria or insects in the first place.

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

Evolution is fascinating to watch. To me it is the most interesting when one can observe the evolution of a single man.

Evolution never looks to the future.

Evolution acts slowly. Our psychological characteristics today are those that promoted reproductive success in the ancestral environmen.

Natural selection is not an inflammatory phrase; evolution is.

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

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

Chance alone is at the source of all novelty, all creation in the biosphere.

Evolution - evolutionary change - does not happen quickly.

Natural selection is not evolution.

Evolutionary biologists are not content merely to explain how variation occurs within limits, however. They aspire to answer a much broader question-which is how complex organisms like birds, and flowers, and human beings came into existence in the first place.

The theory of undirected evolution is already dead, but the work of science continues.

In the animal world, on the other hand, the process of evolution is characterised by the progressive discrimination of the animal and vegetative functions, and a consequent differentiation of these two great provinces into their separate departments.

What humans can't engineer, evolution can.

Our physiological constitution is obviously a product of Darwinian processes, insofar as you buy the evolutional theory as a generative, as an account of the mechanism that generated us. Our physiology evolved, our behaviors evolved, and our accounts of those behaviors, both successful and unsuccessful, evolved.

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

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

What an odd time to be a fundamentalist about adaptation and natural selection - when each major subdiscipline of evolutionary biology has been discovering other mechanisms as adjuncts to selection's centrality.

Human evolution, at first, seems extraordinary. How could the process that gave rise to slugs and oak trees and fish produce a creature that can fly to the moon and invent the Internet and cross the ocean in boats?

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.

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.

Darwin's theory of evolution is a framework by which we understand the diversity of life on Earth. But there is no equation sitting there in Darwin's 'Origin of Species' that you apply and say, 'What is this species going to look like in 100 years or 1,000 years?' Biology isn't there yet with that kind of predictive precision.