Quotes about Reproductive Fitness

Lafcadio Hearn

The great principle of Western society is that competition rules here as it rules in everything else. The best man - that is to say, the strongest and cleverest - is likely to get the best woman, in the sense of the most beautiful person.

Adolf Hitler

The demand that defective people be prevented from propagating equally defective offspring is a demand of the clearest reason and if systematically executed represents the most humane act of mankind.

Richard Dawkins

The world is well supplied with spiders whose male ancestors died after mating. The world is bereft of spiders whose would-be ancestors never mated in the first place.

Francis Galton

Eugenics is the study of the agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations either physically or mentally.

Helen Fisher

In courtship, who wins and who loses will determine who passes on their DNA to tomorrow.

George C. Williams

The general rule is that anything that is passed on in reproduction does not undergo senescence.

Helen Fisher

It certainly would have been adaptive for ancestral man to have a chubby wife during stressful times of famine. Not only would she have had more calories to burn, and thus more energy and endurance, but since fat stores estrogen, she would have remained fertile for longer.

Lisa Kleypas

I’ve never heard that the sexual act requires any particular intelligence. From what I’ve observed, many stupid people are easily able to produce children.

Becca Fitzpatrick

men are attracted to beauty because it indicates health and youth—no point mating with a sickly woman who won’t be around to raise the children.

Konrad Lorenz

Natural selection does not give any preference at all to anything that, in the long run, could be advantageous for the species but blindly rewards everything that, momentarily, affords greater procreative success.

Nikola Tesla

A century from now it will no more occur to a normal person to mate with a person eugenically unfit than to marry a habitual criminal.

Ronald Fisher

The most obvious requirement for a society making evolutionary progress … is that reproduction should be somewhat more active among its more successful members, than among its less successful members.

Fisher, a brilliant scientist and mathematician, engaged in some major blunders like denying that tobacco had any relationship to lung cancer and other disease. This was another. His “conclusion” that the more “successful” members of society should breed in preference to the less successful. There are three major fallacies in his argument and that of other eugenics supporters other than the obvious ethical and moral problems. First, human success in any society is determined by both genetic and environmental factors. In general, it is currently impossible to know who the successful would be if environmental factors were equal. Second, our concept of success is quite narrow from an evolutionary point of view. The most successful humans might be those who produce that most children, or those who extend man’s habitat, or those who will be most resistant to a pandemic that will arise in the near future. Third, by the standards of much of English society at the time, the most “successful” people were the monarchy and heredity aristocracy, There was already too much inbreeding in these groups and increasing this groups breeding rather than others would not only weaken the species over time, but would limit the variation that is necessary for natural selection and further evolution of the human species.

Jonathan Haidt

Individuals who could not form cooperative alliances, on average, died sooner and left fewer children. And so we are the descendants of the successful cooperators.

David Brin

Above all, TRIBES is fun, and even kind of sexy... in that every round features an Opportunity for Reproduction, which is the main aim of the game, as it is in most of Nature.

Richard Dawkins

Superficially it's a problem if homosexuality is genetic - if the difference between people's sexual preferences is genetic - because at least a pure homosexual would be unlikely to reproduce and therefore pass on the genes. So the first question you ask is, is it actually genetic, and the answer is probably to some extent yes.

Nadya Suleman

I've got good genes, and my body just always seems to bounce back after my pregnancies.

Charles Darwin

I should premise that I use the term “Struggle for Existence” in a large and Metaphorical Sense, including dependence of one being on another, and including (which is more important) success in leaving progeny.

Even today many people find Darwin’s views wanting because of the struggle and survival of the fittest concept implying that all creatures physically battle for survival and existance. But as this quotation illustrated, this was and is a very narrow view of Darwin’s concept of the struggle. Creatures fighting with each other is only a small part of this struggle. Larger parts are adapting to changed climate, versatility in food selection and extremely important a successful breeding pattern. The Thompson’s Gazelle is the most eaten animal on the African plains, and has virtually no defenses, but is an amazing breeder, with the shortest period of gestation of any mammal and the number of pregnancies per year. This little antelopes are thriving while they are eaten by most predators while the Lion, the strongest predator whom no animal will threaten, is becoming extinct.

Reproductive Fitness Quotes