Feng Zhang Quotes

When a trait is universal, evolutionary biologists look for a genetic explanation and wonder how that gene or genes might enhance survival or reproductive success.

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.

Natural selection may lead to benefits for species, but these 'higher' advantages can only arise as sequelae, or side consequences, of natural selection's causal mechanism: differential reproductive success of individuals.

I believe there is a reason such as autism, severe manic-depression, and schizophrenia remain in our gene pool even though there is much suffering as a result.

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.

Real biologists who actually do the research will tell you that they almost never find a phenomenon, no matter how odd or irrelevant it looks when they first see it, that doesn't prove to serve a function. The outcome itself may be due to small accidents of evolution.

I'm looking for all the things that are beneficial in the human genome. Everything that I do is based on a very simple principle: things that are beneficial will spread through populations very quickly.

The fuel for evolution is diversity, with natural selection leading to continuous adaptations and improvements in Nature's handiwork.

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.

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

For me, the level at which natural selection causes the phenomenon of adaptation is the level of the replicator - the gene.

Natural selection will not remove ignorance from future generations.

At a minimum, in explaining evolutionary pathways through time, the constraints imposed by history rise to equal prominence with the immediate advantages of adaptation.

What Darwinian theory shows us is that all human races are extremely close to each other. None of them is in any sense ancestral to any other; none of them is more primitive than any other. We are all modern races of exactly equal status, evolutionarily speaking.

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.

Evolution is all about passing on the genome to the next generation, adapting and surviving through generation after generation. From an evolutionary point of view, you and I are like the booster rockets designed to send the genetic payload into the next level of orbit and then drop off into the sea.

Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous.

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.

I remember my first lecture on my first day in evolutionary biology, how populations and species change. I sat thinking, 'Why doesn't everyone know this?' I look back on it almost in horror: I came so close to not knowing how exciting our world is.

I think that my main criticism in that book was directed at the general assumption that adaptation characterizes populations and species, rather than simply the individuals in the populations and species.

I am a student of evolution and adaptation.

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.

Proteins aren't designed, they're evolved.