Jim Goad Quotes

Humans are mutants, everything's a mutant - things that evolve.

The capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel of DNA. Without this special attribute, we would still be anaerobic bacteria and there would be no music.

The great mystery of adaptation is that true fidelity can only be achieved through lavish promiscuity.

The theory of founder effects does not explain how novel features like plumage traits arise.

Jumping genes are fundamental because they're agents of change. Everybody knows that organisms evolve. What makes them evolve is that their genes are dynamic and in motion. A familiar example is the stripe-y corn - called Indian corn - that you buy in the fall.

A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known.

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

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.

New gene pools are generated in every generation, and evolution takes place because the successful individuals produced by these gene pools give rise to the next generation.

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

Mutations are exciting, there aren't nearly enough of them.

Simple DNA gradually morphed and evolved, so that you had the coming into being of ever more complex and diverse creatures, until one day you wake up and find there are peacocks and giraffes. Nature is an open-ended experiment based on morphing a DNA code, and ours is an open-ended experiment based on morphing a crochet code.

You are a side effect," Van Houten continued, "of an evolutionary process that cares little for individual lives. You are a failed experiment in mutation.

If the germ plasm wants to swim in the ocean, it makes itself a fish; if the germ plasm wants to fly in the air, it makes itself a bird. If it wants to go to Harvard, it makes itself a man. The strangest thing of all is that the germ plasm that we carry around within us has done all those things. There was a time, hundreds of millions of years ago, when it was making fish. Then ... amphibia ... reptiles ... mammals, and now it's making men.

It's not the 'nice' guy who brings about real social change. 'Nice' guys look nice because they're conforming. It's the 'bad' guys, who only look nice a hundred years later, that are the real Dynamic force in social evolution.

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.

I doubt evolution is real.

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.

When things get bad enough, then something happens to correct the course. And it's for that reason that I speak about evolution as an error-making and an error-correcting process. And if we can be ever so much better - ever so much slightly better - at error correcting than at error making, then we'll make it.

Darwin was as much of an emancipator as was Lincoln.

I'll admit that the discovery of evolution is humbling, but it is also empowering. It transforms our relationship to the life around us. Instead of being outsiders watching the natural world go by, we are insiders. We are part of the process; we are the exquisite result of billions of years of natural research and development.

Most species do their own evolving, making it up as they go along, which is the way Nature intended.

The equation of evolution with progress represents our strongest cultural impediment to a proper understanding of this greatest biological revolution in the history of human thought.

Real life seeks the gentle slopes at the back of Mount Improbable, while creationists are blind to all but the daunting precipice at the front.

Everything has to evolve or else it perishes.