Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

What natural selection cannot do, is to modify the structure of one species, without giving it any advantage, for the good of another species; and though statements to this effect may be found in works of natural history, I cannot find one case which will bear investigation.

Natural selection will never produce in a being anything injurious to itself, for natural selection acts solely by and for the good of each.

And therefore, if in my natural history, which has been collected and tested with so much diligence, severity, and I may say religious care, there still lurk at intervals certain falsities or errors in the particulars, what is to be said of common natural history, which in comparison with mine is so negligent and inexact?

As the traditional conception of mind slowly gave way to the overwhelming campaign of natural sciences, so the idea that the concept of mind was something beyond the natural, causal order began to appear inherently problematic, and definitely incapable of serving as an 'unexplained explainer'.

From this cause alone the intermediate varieties will be liable to accidental extermination; and during the process of further modification through natural selection, they will almost certainly be beaten and supplanted by the forms which they connect; for these from existing in greater numbers will, in the aggregate, present more variation, and thus be further improved through natural selection and gain further advantages.

CVII And here also should be remembered what was said above concerning the extending of the range of natural philosophy to take in the particular sciences, and the referring or bringing back of the particular sciences to natural philosophy, that the branches of knowledge may not be severed and cut off from the stem.

If it were possible to show that these prelinguistic symbolic systems share certain significant properties with natural language, we could then argue that these properties of natural language are acquired by analogy.

Extinction has only separated groups: it has by no means made them; for if every form which has ever lived on this earth were suddenly to reappear, though it would be quite impossible to give definitions by which each group could be distinguished from other groups, as all would blend together by steps as fine as those between the finest existing varieties, nevertheless a natural classification, or at least a natural arrangement, would be possible.

It combines the key idea of the cognitive revolution of the 1950s and 1960s—that the mind is a computational system—with the key idea of the new evolutionary biology of the 1960s and 1970s—that signs of design in the natural world are products of the natural selection of replicating entities, namely genes.

The fact, as we have seen, that all past and present organic beings constitute one grand natural system, with group subordinate to group, and with extinct groups often falling in between recent groups, is intelligible on the theory of natural selection with its contingencies of extinction and divergence of character.