Steven Johnson Quotes

Jumping genes are fundamental because they're agents of change. Everybody knows that organisms evolve. What makes them evolve is that their genes are dynamic and in motion. A familiar example is the stripe-y corn - called Indian corn - that you buy in the fall.

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.

The great mystery of adaptation is that true fidelity can only be achieved through lavish promiscuity.

As a consequence, geneticists described evolution simply as a change in gene frequencies in populations, totally ignoring the fact that evolution consists of the two simultaneous but quite separate phenomena of adaptation and diversification.

We find all kinds of species that have taken up a second chromosome or a third one from somewhere, adding thousands of new traits in a second to that species. So, people who think of evolution as just one gene changing at a time have missed much of biology.

With evolution, things are always changing, so I sort of think: Should we all be growing three heads?

Humans are mutants, everything's a mutant - things that evolve.

Chance alone is at the source of all novelty, all creation in the biosphere.

Evolution - evolutionary change - does not happen quickly.

The proof of evolution lies in those adaptations that arise from improbable foundations.

In microbiology the roles of mutation and selection in evolution are coming to be better understood through the use of bacterial cultures of mutant strains.

But sequence comparisons simply can't account for the development of complex biochemical systems any more than Darwin's comparison of simple and complex eyes told him how vision worked.

The theory of evolution is quite rightly called the greatest unifying theory in biology. The diversity of organisms, similarities and differ- ences between kinds of organisms, patterns of distribution and behavior, adaptation and interaction, all this was merely a bewildering chaos of facts until given meaning by the evolutionary theory.

What humans can't engineer, evolution can.

Evolution never stops or ends. Such a cessation would be cataclysmic catastrophe.

These signal diversities which constitute differences of race in animals... can only be explained by two principles... namely, the occasional production of an offspring with different characters from those of the parents, as a native or congenital variety; and the propagation of such varieties by generation.

Radiation is one of the important factors in evolution. It causes mutation, and some level of mutation is actually good for evolution.

Mutations are exciting, there aren't nearly enough of them.

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

Evolution acts slowly. Our psychological characteristics today are those that promoted reproductive success in the ancestral environmen.

The theory of founder effects does not explain how novel features like plumage traits arise.

Natural selection certainly operates. It explains how bacteria will gain antibiotic resistance; it will explain how insects get insecticide resistance, but it doesn't explain how you get bacteria or insects in the first place.

What an odd time to be a fundamentalist about adaptation and natural selection - when each major subdiscipline of evolutionary biology has been discovering other mechanisms as adjuncts to selection's centrality.

As human beings, we are the genetic elite, the sentient, contemplating and innovating sum of countless genetic accidents and transcription errors.