Famous quotes containing the words natural selection, theory, natural and/or selection:
“Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of the watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.”
—Richard Dawkins (b. 1941)
“By the “mud-sill” theory it is assumed that labor and education are incompatible; and any practical combination of them impossible. According to that theory, a blind horse upon a tread-mill, is a perfect illustration of what a laborer should be—all the better for being blind, that he could not tread out of place, or kick understandingly.... Free labor insists on universal education.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“You would compliment a coxcomb doing a good act, but you would not praise an angel. The silence that accepts merit as the most natural thing in the world, is the highest applause.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection determined the evolution of cultures in the same manner as it did that of species.”
—Konrad Lorenz (1903–1989)