Selection Quotes
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It's a chance to make an impression on the NCAA selection committee. We've got two quality teams (Kansas, then Iowa State on Saturday in Boulder) left. If we come out strong, we can definitely make some noise.
Chris Copeland
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Natural selection may be unconscious but, as Darwin and his successors made clear, it is the opposite of a random force. It can drive changes in an organism in a very linear, per sis tent fashion—as had been observed in the laboratory, in nature, and in simulations such as the one that modeled eye evolution. Denton was wrong about evolution’s being one big lottery. The correct analogy would be a game of darts in which the players cannot see the target. Some darts will find their mark while the majority will miss—a random process. But the rules of the game eliminate all but the best-thrown darts. Because nature tosses an im mense number of darts—the mutation rate in any single gene in an organism will run in the millions—natural selection has plenty of well-targeted darts to choose from, and the march toward new and complex forms is not so difficult to understand, after all. But presenting an accurate meta phor would not have supported an attack on evolution.
Edward Humes
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Our own species evolved under the influence of group selection, as Darwin emphasized when he discussed the evolution of altruism.
Elliott Sober
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From a good lie in the middle of a fairway bunker, I'll make the same swing as I do from an average fairway lie. I'll dig my feet in slightly and keep my lower body stable so I won't slip, but I don't change my club selection or setup. It's only when the ball is sitting down in the sand that I'll make some modifications.
Ernie Els
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These capacities for randomness may have been amplified into human creativity through sexual and social selection.
Geoffrey Miller
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I still reject lead roles, as I don't accept any role if I don't find it challenging enough. I am very careful while making selections.
Boman Irani
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In competitive archery, risk assessment has minimal bearing on quality of performance, since the archer has so little choice over shot selection. By contrast, in a hunt, shots vary in quality according to how well selected they may be.
Ernest Sosa
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Last Saturday morning, the day of the game the Big West tournament final against Long Beach State, a 78-70 victory, I get a call from my dad. My son's wife just had our first granddaughter back north in Walnut Creek, so as soon as the game ended, I had some pizza with the players and went to bed, and the next morning at 5:30, I drove back up to see them, had to go 101 because the Grapevine was closed, and then drove to Stockton for the selection show. I haven't had time to celebrate, but I'll be able to celebrate that every day.
Bob Thomason
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It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection.
Thomas Nagel
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Evolution thus is merely contingent on certain processes articulated by Darwin: variation and selection.
Ernst Mayr
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The crucial first step to survival in all organisms is habitat selection. If you get to the right place, everything else is likely to be easier.
Elisabeth Tova Bailey
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Scientific theories never dictate human values, but they can often cast new light on ethical issues. From a sexual selection viewpoint, moral philosophy and political theory have mostly been attempts to shift male human sexual competitiveness from physical violence to the peaceful accumulation of wealth and status. The rights to life, liberty, and property are cultural inventions that function, in part, to keep males from killing and stealing from one another while they compete to attract sexual partners.
Geoffrey Miller
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I spent a lot of money and time at pizza places. Golf and Stuff in Ventura, right off the 101, was my hangout. Skating Plus, right behind it, always had a good selection of games. That was the place to be when you were from Oxnard back in the '80s.
Rich Moore
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Anyone who writes about "Darwin's theory of evolutionin the singular, without segregating the theories of gradual evolution, common descent, speciation, and the mechanism of natural selection, will be quite unable to discuss the subject competently.
Ernst Mayr
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It is an interesting fact about model selection that the evidence at hand can indicate that a model known to be false will be more predictively accurate than a model known to be true. This opens the door to a kind of instrumentalism.
Elliott Sober
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The only difficulty is to know what bits to choose and what to leave out. Novel-writing is not creation, it is selection.
Winifred Holtby
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Among the Spartans all newly born children were subject to a careful examination or selection. All those that were weak, sickly, or affected with any bodily infirmity, were killed. Only the perfectly healthy and strong children were allowed to live, and they alone afterwards propagated the race.
Ernst Haeckel
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We are moving from unconscious evolution through natural selection to conscious evolution by choice.
Barbara Marx Hubbard
