Sydney Brenner Quotes

Evolution is all about looking forward.

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

Evolution - evolutionary change - does not happen quickly.

I was taught over and over again that the accumulation of random mutations led to evolutionary change - led to new species. I believed it until I looked for evidence.

There are no shortcuts in evolution.

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

What humans can't engineer, evolution can.

Evolution never stops or ends. Such a cessation would be cataclysmic catastrophe.

We are not evolved but evolving.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

I think Darwinism as a theory explaining evolution within species is incredibly brilliant - just unbelievably, incredibly brilliant.

The study of evolution is an evolution in itself.

Evolution thus is merely contingent on certain processes articulated by Darwin: variation and selection.

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

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

Life is a process of evolution.

Agricultural practice served Darwin as the material basis for the elaboration of his theory of Evolution, which explained the natural causation of the adaptation we see in the structure of the organic world. That was a great advance in the knowledge of living nature.

Natural selection is not evolution.

The more specific idea of Evolution now reached is - a change from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, accompanying the dissipation of motion and integration of matter.

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

One of things we say on 'Arrow' is, 'The only constant is evolution.'