Daniel Levitin Quotes

Biologically the species is the accumulation of the experiments of all its successful individuals since the beginning.

Natural selection is anything but random.

I'm here as a product of process of evolution, which doesn't make very many exceptions. And which rates life relatively cheaply.

Evolution is among the most well-established theories in the scientific community. To doubt it sounds to biologists as absurd as denying relativity does to physicists.

Whatever the life form, evolution selects for economy of resources.

Evolution thus is merely contingent on certain processes articulated by Darwin: variation and selection.

Agricultural practice served Darwin as the material basis for the elaboration of his theory of Evolution, which explained the natural causation of the adaptation we see in the structure of the organic world. That was a great advance in the knowledge of living nature.

Natural selection is not evolution.

Animals can adapt to problems and make inventions, but often no faster than natural selection can do its work - the world acts as its own simulator in the case of natural selection.

Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability

We should not live by Darwinian principles. But Darwin explains how we got here.

There's nothing like evolution for engineering beautiful organisms.

The fuel for evolution is diversity, with natural selection leading to continuous adaptations and improvements in Nature's handiwork.

Evolution is all about looking forward.

Evolution, to me, is the best designer of all time.

Your creatures can come into being only, like shoot from stem, as part of an endlessly renewed process of evolution.

I have always had this basic biological question in terms of evolution, if the drive to evolution is to like survive. An organism that survives well, there is really no need for consciousness in there.

This fundamental subject of Natural Selection will be treated at some length in the fourth chapter; and we shall then see how Natural Selection almost inevitably causes much Extinction of the less improved forms of life and induces what I have called Divergence of Character.

This survival of the fittest implies multiplication of the fittest.

Evolution is the fundamental idea in all of life science - in all of biology.

For me, the level at which natural selection causes the phenomenon of adaptation is the level of the replicator - the gene.

It was a shock to people of the nineteenth century when they discovered, from observations science had made, that many features of the biological world could be ascribed to the elegant principle of natural selection.

Evolution was far more thrilling to me than the biblical account. Who would not rather be a rising ape than a falling angel? To my juvenile eyes, Darwin was proved true every day. It doesn't take much to make us flip back into monkeys again.

First, Darwinian theory tells us how a certain amount of diversity in life forms can develop once we have various types of complex living organisms already in existence.

Evolution isn't just a take-it-or-leave-it story about where we came from. It's an epic at the centre of life itself. It tells us we are part of nature in every respect.