Karl Pilkington Quotes

Evolution - evolutionary change - does not happen quickly.

What humans can't engineer, evolution can.

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

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.

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.

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.

Darwin's theory of evolution is a framework by which we understand the diversity of life on Earth. But there is no equation sitting there in Darwin's 'Origin of Species' that you apply and say, 'What is this species going to look like in 100 years or 1,000 years?' Biology isn't there yet with that kind of predictive precision.

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.

Natural selection is not evolution.

If evolution is outlawed, only outlaws will evolve.

There are no shortcuts in evolution.

Evolution is fascinating to watch. To me it is the most interesting when one can observe the evolution of a single man.

I remember my first lecture on my first day in evolutionary biology, how populations and species change. I sat thinking, 'Why doesn't everyone know this?' I look back on it almost in horror: I came so close to not knowing how exciting our world is.

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.

Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.

Our physiological constitution is obviously a product of Darwinian processes, insofar as you buy the evolutional theory as a generative, as an account of the mechanism that generated us. Our physiology evolved, our behaviors evolved, and our accounts of those behaviors, both successful and unsuccessful, evolved.

Evolution is all about looking forward.

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

The essence of Darwinism lies in its claim that natural selection creates the fit. Variation is ubiquitous and random in direction. It supplies raw material only. Natural selection directs the course of evolutionary change.

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

Evolution is a tinkerer.

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.

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

We know evolution happened because innumerable bits of data from myriad fields of science conjoin to paint a rich portrait of life's pilgrimage.