Selection Quotes
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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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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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Genetic algorithms (GAs) are defined as search procedures based on the mechanics of natural selection and genetics, and we think we know what innovation is - at least in some sort of qualitative way - but what does one have to do with the other?
David Edward
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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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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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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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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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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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If a shot aimed at aptness succeeds aptly, it is then fully apt, since it is not only apt but also aptly apt. But the full aptness of such an attempt is entirely compatible with its being a horrible murder, if the "hunter" is an assassin and the prey his victim. That hunter's shot may still be outstandingly, fully apt, if it manifests the agent's competence in both archery dexterity and shot selection.
Ernest Sosa
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We are moving from unconscious evolution through natural selection to conscious evolution by choice.
Barbara Marx Hubbard
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There is wisdom in the selection of wisdom.
Bergen Evans
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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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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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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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Darwin repeatedly used the hypothesis of common ancestry as a platform on which to build his various ideas about testing hypotheses concerning natural selection. He also argued that adaptive similarities provide little or no evidence for common ancestry. Although this second claim needs to be fine-tuned, Darwin was right that ample evidence for common ancestry can exist even if none of the characteristics we observe were caused to evolve by natural selection.
Elliott Sober
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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
