Richard Preston Quotes

Every time somebody new gets the Ebola virus, it mutates.

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.

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

Viruses have to live somewhere. They can only replicate in living creatures. So, when the Ebola virus disappears between outbreaks, it has to be living in some reservoir host, presumably some species of animal.

It used to be thought that our genes were historically immutable and that it was not possible to imagine a conversation between culture and genetics.

If we didn't have genetic mutations, we wouldn't have us. You need error to open the door to the adjacent possible.

In agriculture, people have taken wild plants that can't be eaten by people - and turned them into wonderful food sources. And that's because genomes can change, and people working with plants have picked mutations. Mutations are nothing more than genetic changes.

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

Where we are going as a species is a big question. Human evolution certainly hasn't stopped. Every time individuals produce a new zygote, there's a reshuffling and recombination of genes. And we don't know where all of that is going to take us.

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.

All I claimed was that when a drastic change occurs, it occurs in a relatively small and isolated population.

Indeed, I was unable to find any evidence whatsoever of the occurrence of a drastic evolutionary acceleration and genetic reconstruction in widespread, populous species.

In microbiology the roles of mutation and selection in evolution are coming to be better understood through the use of bacterial cultures of mutant strains.

Heredity provides for the modification of its own machinery.

For the first time, we have the genetic sequences of all three of the players in the global malaria debacle: the parasite, the anopheles mosquito and the human. It's a very important milestone.

I am a student of evolution and adaptation.

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.

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

The most consequential change in man's view of the world, of living nature and of himself came with the introduction, over a period of some 100 years beginning only in the 18th century, of the idea of change itself, of change over periods of time: in a word, of evolution.

The genome is a book that wrote itself, continually adding, deleting and amending over four billion years.

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

Evolutionary plasticity can be purchased only at the ruthlessly dear price of continuously sacrificing some individuals to death from unfavourable mutations. Bemoaning this imperfection of nature has, however, no place in a scientific treatment of this subject.

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.

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

Optimization hinders evolution.