Genetic Adaptation Quotes

Suffering is a byproduct of evolution by natural selection, an inevitable consequence that may worry us in our more sympathetic moments but cannot be expected to worry a tiger - even if a tiger can be said to worry about anything at all - and certainly cannot be expected to worry its genes.

Darwin was Wrong! Man's still an ape.

The DNA-encoded catalytic machinery of the cell can rapidly learn to promote new chemical reactions when we provide new reagents and the appropriate incentive in the form of artificial selection.

Why do some die and some live? The answer was clearly, that on the whole the best fitted live. From the effects of disease the most healthy escaped; from enemies, the strongest, swiftest, or the most cunning; from famine, the best hunters or those with the best digestion; and so on. Then it suddenly flashed upon me that this self-acting process would necessarily improve the race, because in every generation the inferior would inevitably be killed off and the superior would remain-that is, the fittest would survive.

All organisms vary, and it's just folk knowledge. You just have to look around a room of people, and everybody knows that it's true. Darwin didn't know the mechanism of heredity, but you don't have to. You just need to know the fact of it.

Darwin found out that when you took horses up to the high country in the Middle East, they would then grow long hair after a season or two. But when you took them - these long-haired horses - back into the low, hot country, they wouldn't get rid of the long hair, just in case, for about four generations.

The good news may be that Nature is phasing out the white man, but the bad news is that's who She thinks we all are.

The software programs that make our body run ... were evolved in very different times. We'd like to actually change those programs. One little software program, called the fat insulin receptor gene, basically says, 'Hold onto every calorie, because the next hunting season may not work out so well.' That was in the interests of the species tens of thousands of years ago. We'd like to turn that program off.

[E]volutionists sometimes take as haughty an attitude toward the next level up the conventional ladder of disciplines: the human sciences. They decry the supposed atheoretical particularism of their anthropological colleagues and argue that all would be well if only the students of humanity regarded their subject as yet another animal and therefore yielded explanatory control to evolutionary biologists.

The student of biology is often struck with the feeling that historians, when dealing with the rise and fall of nations, do not generally view the phenomena from a sufficiently high biological standpoint. To me, at least, they seem to attach too much importance to individual rulers and soldiers, and to particular wars, policies, religions, and customs; while at the same time they make little attempt to extract the fundamental causes of national success or failure.

Every mutation through a new combination of genetic factors that provides the organism with a new opportunity for coming to terms with the conditions of its environment signifies no more and no less than that new information about this environment has got into that organic system. Adaptation is essentially a cognitive process.

We're supposed to keep evolving. Evolution did not end with us growing opposable thumbs. You do know that, right?

When I was working on my Ph.D., I developed a computer algorithm to look for rapid changes in populations' DNA. Our DNA changes constantly over generations, but if certain changes spread through a population more quickly than others, they are probably the beneficial results of natural selection. This is the protection we give ourselves to survive.

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.

Our ancestors didn't need any genetic enhancements to be able to sit for twelve hours a day and eat fatty, sugary foods, but we need enhancements that handle that altered environment.

Are we at some kind of evolutionary equipoise as a species? Or, are we destined to become something different - something, perhaps, even better adapted to the environment?

If humanity can exist for another million years, everybody's going to be a light shade of yellow-brown-red-tan.

Individuals are not stable things, they are fleeting. Chromosomes too are shuffled into oblivion, like hands of cards soon after they are dealt. But the cards themselves survive the shuffling. The cards are the genes. The genes are not destroyed by crossing-over, they merely change partners and march on. Of course they march on. That is their business. They are the replicators and we are their survival machines. When we have served our purpose we are cast aside. But genes are denizens of geological time: genes are forever.

Our genomes are evolving and changing every single day.

you just took on five million years of evolution again

When you have a natural genetic tan developed over centuries and many generations, the idea of soaking up rays by the pool has never made sense.

Your genes are not your fate... if you change your lifestyle, you change your genes.

The human organism inherits so delicate an adjustment to climate that, in spite of man's boasted ability to live anywhere, the strain of the frozen North eliminates the more nervous and active types of mind.

What you see in living systems, and in genetic systems, is that the genes are already there, having arisen in the course of time, and when they are needed they become activated. If they had to be invented, the time would be too late.

The immune system constantly creates genes on the fly that are specific to the things that show up in the body. It's amazing.