Richard Dawkins Quotes

Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability

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 fittest survive. What is meant by the fittest? Not the strongest; not the cleverest - weakness and stupidity everywhere survive. There is no way of determining fitness except in that a thing does survive. 'Fitness,' then, is only another name for 'survival.' Darwinism: That survivors survive.

This survival of the fittest implies multiplication of the fittest.

Whatever the life form, evolution selects for economy of resources.

Evolution doesn't just look for things that are fun; if it did, we'd know how to fly.

I have always had this basic biological question in terms of evolution, if the drive to evolution is to like survive. An organism that survives well, there is really no need for consciousness in there.

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

It cannot but happen?that those will survive whose functions happen to be most nearly in equilibrium with the modified aggregate of external forces? This survival of the fittest implies multiplication of the fittest.

Evolution doesn't care about what makes sense; it cares about what works

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

It at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed.

Evolution does not necessarily favor the longest-lived. It doesn't necessarily favor the biggest or the strongest or the fastest, and not even the smartest. Evolution favors those creatures best adapted to their environment. That is the sole test of survival and success.

I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term Natural Selection.

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.

We're not the best, but we happen to be what evolution came up with.

Evolution favors the survival of the wisest.

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.

The law of evolution is that the strongest survives.

Mutation is random; natural selection is the very opposite of random.

People will say, "You're never going to convince me that something as complicated as an eye could come about by sheer chance." And the answer is that natural selection is the very opposite of sheer chance. Natural selection is a non-random process.

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 called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term Natural Selection, in order to mark its relation to man's power of selection. But the expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient.

Multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.

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