Everything in nature is the result of fixed laws.
Charles DarwinRead
I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection.
Interpretation
Natural selection explains how useful variations in species are preserved over generations.
This quote by Charles Darwin encapsulates the idea of natural selection, a fundamental concept in evolutionary biology. It suggests that in nature, the variations among individuals that are advantageous for survival and reproduction are retained and passed on to future generations, leading to gradual adaptation and evolution of species over time.
In practice
In a biology class while discussing the principles of evolution.
Everything in nature is the result of fixed laws.
The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.
I am quite conscious that my speculations run beyond the bounds of true science....It is a mere rag of an hypothesis with as many flaw[s] & holes as sound parts.
We cannot fathom the marvelous complexity of an organic being; but on the hypothesis here advanced this complexity is much increased. Each living creature must be looked at as a microcosm--a little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars in heaven.
we are always slow in admitting any great change of which we do not see the intermediate steps
I am not the least afraid to die
As a Christian, but also as a scientist responsible for overseeing the Human Genome Project, one of my concerns has been the limits on applications of our understanding of the genome. Should there be limits? I think there should. I think the public has expressed their concern about ways this information might be misused.
I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientist, maybe my brother, would have taken a color photograph of God Almighty—and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine. Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable. What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.
And anyone who thinks they can talk about quantum theory without feeling dizzy hasn't yet understood the first thing about it.
The problem is that many people operate on the assumption that NASA should go to Congress every year with hat in hand and justify it every year. Well, I see it as the greatest economic driver that there ever was. Economic drivers don't need justification.
I do not want to drive across a bridge designed by an engineer who believed the numbers in structural stress models are relative truths.
It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.
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