Evolutionary Quotes
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Often in evolutionary processes a species must adapt to new conditions in order to survive.
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We still don't know what evolutionary significance to attach to it, but it is at the very least interesting that a telomere gene is related to obesity.
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If Nature does not wish that weaker individuals should mate with the stronger, she wishes even less that a superior race should intermingle with an inferior one; because in such a case all her efforts, throughout hundreds of thousands of years, to establish an evolutionary higher stage of being, may thus be rendered futile.
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Evolutionary psychologists suggest that humans experienced evolutionary benefits from brain developments that included aversion to loss and risk and from instincts for cooperation that helped strengthen communities.
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Check your testosterone levels. Every study on evolutionary psychology has correlated testosterone levels with dominance.
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The more evolutionary theory gets called an atheistic theory, the greater the risk that it will lose its place in public school biology courses in the United States. If the theory is thought of in this way, one should not be surprised if a judge at some point decides that teaching evolutionary theory violates the Constitutional principle of neutrality with respect to religion.
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To live in an evolutionary spirit means to engage with full ambition and without any reserve in the structure of the present, and yet to let go and flow into a new structure when the right time has come.
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Slugs, despite what one might think, given their naked look, do not predate snails on the evolutionary tree but were once snails that evolved over time to be shellless.
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The big picture, I think, is that common ancestry is evidentially prior to natural selection in Darwin's theory and in contemporary evolutionary biology as well.
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What I should have said is that he thinks that there is a conflict between evolutionary biology and theism. Dennett thinks that evolutionary theory shows that it is irrational to believe that God exists; he thinks that the theory has this consequence because he thinks that the Design Argument was the only remotely plausible argument for God’s existence and evolutionary theory destroyed that argument.
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Evolutionary biologists often appeal to parsimony when they seek to explain why organisms "match" with respect to a given trait. For example, why do almost all the organisms that are alive today on our planet use the same genetic code? If they share a common ancestor, the code could have evolved just once and then been inherited from the most recent common ancestor that present organisms share. On the other hand, if organisms in different species share no common ancestors, the code must have evolved repeatedly.
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I don't endorse deism or interventionist theism. My point is just that evolutionary biology is logically compatible with the former and with some versions of the latter.
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Evolutionary game theory was originally developed as an alternative to the hypothesis of group selection; now it is clear that game theory models postulate group selection, even if they do not use the g-word.
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I disagree with those who argue that evolutionary biology and the existence of God are incompatible.
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In order to survive, an animal must be born into a favoring or at least tolerant environment. Similarly, in order to achieve preservation and recognition, a specimen of fossil man must be discovered in intelligence, attested by scientific knowledge, and interpreted by evolutionary experience. These rigorous prerequisites have undoubtedly caused many still-births in human palaeontology and are partly responsible for the high infant mortality of discoveries of geologically ancient man.
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I believe there is an evolutionary impulse toward good that is etched on every human heart. It is placed there by the hand of God.
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Evolutionary psychology is one of four sciences that are bringing human nature back into the picture.
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There can be no evolutionary advantage to laying down memories of childhood or perceiving the color of a rose if it doesn't affect the way you're going to move later in life.
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Philosophers of biology generally recognize that evolutionary fitness (roughly, an organism's ability to survive and reproduce in its environment) is multiply realizable.
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The culmination of all of that was the decision to start a company, which became Lotus, to do a product, which became 1-2-3. By the time I reached that point it had been four years, and it felt like a lifetime, but really it was kind of evolutionary.
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Both of these branches of evolutionary science, are, in my opinion, in the closest causal connection; this arises from the reciprocal action of the laws of heredity and adaptation.
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Evolutionary theory, properly understood, does not conflict with the idea that God occasionally intervenes in nature - for example, by once or twice causing a beneficial mutation to occur. Biologists have not detected any such interventions despite the data and theory they have assembled about mutation. However, I think it is a mistake to expect biological experiments to be able to detect such one-off acts of divine intervention, especially if those acts occurred in the distant past. Science isn't in that line of work.
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Problems are evolutionary drivers.
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It seems to me that for Darwin the pulsing of evolutionary rates was a strictly vertical phenomenon.
