Doug Stanhope Quotes

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

If we didn't have genetic mutations, we wouldn't have us. You need error to open the door to the adjacent possible.

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.

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.

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

We owe our existence to innovation. Our species exists thanks to four billion years of genetic innovation.

New gene pools are generated in every generation, and evolution takes place because the successful individuals produced by these gene pools give rise to the next generation.

Our genomes are evolving and changing every single day.

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

Just like mutations to DNA in biological organisms allow for evolution through natural selection, forking lets us run multiple experiments in parallel where the strongest versions survive.

The secrets of evolution are death and time-the deaths of enormous numbers of lifeforms that were imperfectly adapted to the environment; and time for a long succession of small mutations.

Simple DNA gradually morphed and evolved, so that you had the coming into being of ever more complex and diverse creatures, until one day you wake up and find there are peacocks and giraffes. Nature is an open-ended experiment based on morphing a DNA code, and ours is an open-ended experiment based on morphing a crochet code.

All evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence... I had to place myself amidst the variation.

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.

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

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.

Pretty much every plant and animal alive today is the result of eons of natural cross-breeding.

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

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

The idea that you would affect evolution is a very profound thing.

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

Indeed, I was unable to find any evidence whatsoever of the occurrence of a drastic evolutionary acceleration and genetic reconstruction in widespread, populous species.

Natural selection is not evolution.

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.

Natural selection eliminates and maybe maintains, but it doesn't create.