Michael Dickinson Quotes

I immediately loved working with flies. They fascinated me and followed me around in my dreams.

Where do we say that a cell became a blade of grass, which became a starfish, which became a cat, which became a donkey, which became a human being? There's a real lack of evidence from change from actual species to a different type of species.

It was always understood that plants and animals, though completely contrasted in their higher representatives, approached each other very closely in their lower and simpler forms. But they were believed not to blend.

It is from the progeny of this parent cell that we all take our looks; we still share genes around, and the resemblance of the enzymes of grasses to those of whales is in fact a family resemblance.

I haven't checked, but I highly suspect that chickens evolved from an egg-laying ancestor, which would mean that there were, in fact, eggs before there were chickens. Genius.

Chance is hugely significant in biology. In fact, the presence of apparent randomness in so many aspects of biology - from mutations in DNA to the chance involved in that one sperm reaching that one egg that became you - suggests that randomness is useful, even necessary, in very many cases.

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

But of course, what the eagle does not realize is that it is participating in a very crude form of natural selection.One day a tortoise will learn how to fly.

If evolution was worth its salt, it should've evolved something better than 'survival of the fittest.' I think a better idea would be 'survival of the wittiest.' At least, that way, creatures that didn't survive could've died laughing.

It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, wherever and whenever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.

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

Evolution happens. There's no football team in the world that has stayed together for time ever more.

Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me. This is easy to write, easy to read, and hard to believe.

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.

Evolution is the law of policies: Darwin said it, Socrates endorsed it, Cuvier proved it and established it for all time in his paper on The Survival of the Fittest. These are illustrious names, this is a mighty doctrine: nothing can ever remove it from its firm base, nothing dissolve it, but evolution.

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

The beauty of evolution is that it does provide an explanation of how you can get complexity out of simplicity. It does it by slow, gradual degree. At no point are you postulating the sudden coming into existence of a complicated being.

Orchids manufacture their intricate devices from the common components of ordinary flowers, parts usually fitted for very different functions. If God had designed a beautiful machine to reflect his wisdom and power, surely he would not have used a collection of parts generally fashioned for other purposes. Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components. Thus, they must have evolved from ordinary flowers.

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.

The goal of evolution is self - conquest

Artificial selection turned the wolf into the shepherd, and the wild grasses into wheat and corn. In fact, almost every plant and animal that we eat today was bred from a wild, less edible ancestor. If artificial selection can work such profound changes in only ten or fifteen thousand years, what can natural selection do operating over billions of years? The answer is all the beauty and diversity of life.

A grain in the balance will determine which individual shall live and which shall die - which variety or species shall increase in number, and which shall decrease, or finally become extinct.

This survival of the fittest implies multiplication of the fittest.

If we're so smart and so much better than all the animals, and man rules the world, why can't we just change all the time from, like, a caterpillar to a butterfly?