Karl Pilkington Quotes

Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components.

Natural selection will not remove ignorance from future generations.

Organisms by their design are not made to adapt too far.

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

Species go extinct because there are historical contraints built into a given body or a given design.

The proof of evolution lies in those adaptations that arise from improbable foundations.

Remember that physical beauty is evolution's way of assuring us that the other person doesn't have too many intestinal parasites.

The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program.

Man has climbed up from some lower animal form, but he has, as it were, pulled the ladder up after him.

Natural selection is anything but random.

If a group of humans began to run regularly, perhaps allowing them to hunt or scavenge more effectively, anatomical changes would follow, especially among the still-developing youngsters.

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

Most organisms either adapt and become part of the system, or get wiped out. The only thing we have to adapt to the system with is our brain. If we don't use it, and we don't adapt fast enough, we won't survive.

Organisms [...] are directed and limited by their past. They must remain imperfect in their form and function, and to that extent unpredictable since they are not optimal machines. We cannot know their future with certainty, if only because a myriad of quirky functional shifts lie within the capacity of any feature, however well adapted to a present role.

Blind nature will nearly always select the most probable, but man can let the most improbable become actual.

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

Everything has to evolve or else it perishes.

In the history of the world the prize has not gone to those species which specialized in methods of violence, or even in defensive armor. In fact, nature began with producing animals encased in hard shells for defense against the ill of life. But smaller animals, without external armor, warm-blooded, sensitive, alert, have cleared those monsters off the face of the earth.

Most species do their own evolving, making it up as they go along, which is the way Nature intended. And this is all very natural and organic and in tune with mysterious cycles of the cosmos, which believes that there's nothing like millions of years of really frustrating trial and error to give a species moral fiber and, in some cases, backbone.

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

Optimization hinders evolution.

Those who refused to respond to the new stimulus would perish. Adapt or perish.

A cockroach can’t defeat a dinosaur. But the cockroach is better at one thing, and it has ensured its survival through the ages: Adaptation. One could adapt to the environment and the other one couldn’t.

To put it crudely but graphically, the monkey who did not have a realistic perception of the tree branch he jumped for was soon a dead monkey-and therefore did not become one of our ancestors.

Why did God make tigers so good at catching prey, and at the same time make prey so good at getting away from tigers? You'd think that if God wanted one thing or the other to happen he'd have engineered it rather better. Maybe he enjoyed the spectator sport?