Wilhelm Ostwald Quotes

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.

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.

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

Evolution acts slowly. Our psychological characteristics today are those that promoted reproductive success in the ancestral environmen.

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.

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

First, Darwinian theory tells us how a certain amount of diversity in life forms can develop once we have various types of complex living organisms already in existence.

Whatever the life form, evolution selects for economy of resources.

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

Nature favors those organisms which leave the environment in better shape for their progeny to survive.

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.

Natural selection eliminates and maybe maintains, but it doesn't create.

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.

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

Progressively thinking biologists, both in our country and abroad, saw in Darwinism the only right road to the further development of scientific biology.

It is difficult to imagine evolution in alien planets operating in any manner other than Darwinian.

Biologically the species is the accumulation of the experiments of all its successful individuals since the beginning.

My theory of evolution is that Darwin was adopted.

In the animal world, on the other hand, the process of evolution is characterised by the progressive discrimination of the animal and vegetative functions, and a consequent differentiation of these two great provinces into their separate departments.

I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term Natural Selection.

The theory of evolution is quite rightly called the greatest unifying theory in biology. The diversity of organisms, similarities and differ- ences between kinds of organisms, patterns of distribution and behavior, adaptation and interaction, all this was merely a bewildering chaos of facts until given meaning by the evolutionary theory.

Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability

I'm a Darwinian.

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