I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Evolution thus is merely contingent on certain processes articulated by Darwin: variation and selection.
Natural selection eliminates and maybe maintains, but it doesn't create.
For me, the level at which natural selection causes the phenomenon of adaptation is the level of the replicator - the gene.
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.
I sometimes ponder on variation form and it seems to me it ought to be more restrained, purer.
Natural selection is anything but random.
Darwin based his theory on generalizations that were strictly empirical. You can go out and see that organisms do vary, that variations are inherited, and that every organism is capable of increasing its numbers in sufficiently favorable circumstances.
Nature conserves, prefers novelty.
The real problem with natural selection is that it makes no intuitive sense. It is like quantum physics; we may intellectually grasp it, but it will never feel right to us.
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.
No opposing quotes found.