Frances Arnold Quotes

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.

Biology is far from understanding exactly how a single cell develops into a baby, but research suggests that human development can ultimately be explained in terms of biochemistry and molecular biology. Most scientists would make a similar statement about evolution.

My prime interests are in evolution and development. I use the cellular slime molds as a tool to seek an understanding of those twin disciplines.

No human can design a good enzyme, yet we are surrounded by them after 3.5 billion years of work by evolution.

Natural selection is not the wind which propels the vessel, but the rudder which, by friction, now on this side and now on that, shapes the course.

All evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence... I had to place myself amidst the variation.

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.

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

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.

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.

God created a number of possibilities in case some of his prototypes failed - that is the meaning of evolution.

There are no shortcuts in evolution.

Animals can adapt to problems and make inventions, but often no faster than natural selection can do its work - the world acts as its own simulator in the case of natural selection.

Natural Selection never made it come to pass, as a habit of nature, that an unsupported stone should move downwards rather than upwards. It applies to no part of inorganic nature, and is very limited even in the phenomena of organic life.

The Theory of Evolution has been proved true

… the action of natural selection upon Man has ... been essentially diminished through the operation of social conditions

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

I'm a Darwinian.

In our evolutionary narratives, the organism itself often seems to play a passive role: a powerless victim, almost, of changes to its environment or mutations in its genes.

Just like mutations to DNA in biological organisms allow for evolution through natural selection, forking lets us run multiple experiments in parallel where the strongest versions survive.

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.

Evolution is good for optimising and that is well understood. But evolution also creates things that no one knew were even possible.

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

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.

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