“Natural selection has served as a kind of intellectual sieve, producing brains and intelligences increasingly competent to deal with the laws of nature. This resonance, extracted by natural selection, between our brains and the universe may help explain a quandary set by Einstein: The most incomprehensible property of the universe, he said, is that it is so comprehensible.”

—  Carl Sagan

Source: The Dragons of Eden (1977), Chapter 9, “Knowledge is Our Destiny: Terrestrial and Extraterrestrial Intelligence” (pp. 242-243)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Natural selection has served as a kind of intellectual sieve, producing brains and intelligences increasingly competent…" by Carl Sagan?
Carl Sagan photo
Carl Sagan365
American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science ed… 1934–1996

Related quotes

“The human brain became large by natural selection (who knows why, but presumably for good cause). Yet surely most “things” now done by our brains, and essential both to our cultures and to our very survival, are epiphenomena of the computing power of this machine, not genetically grounded Darwinian entities created specifically by natural selection for their current function.”

Stephen Jay Gould book An Urchin in the Storm

"Cardboard Darwinism", pp. 48–49
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)

Erik Naggum photo

“Intellectual laziness is punishable by brain death. It is a natural law.”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Usenet signatures

“The brain is a complex system, but that doesn’t mean it’s incomprehensible. Our neural circuits were carved by natural selection to solve problems that our ancestors faced during our species’ evolutionary history. Your brain has been molded by evolutionary pressures just as your spleen and eyes have been. And so has your consciousness. Consciousness developed because it was advantageous, but advantageous only in limited amounts.”

David Eagleman (1971) neuroscientist and author

Incognito: The Secret Lives of The Brain

“Here we are after a couple million years of natural selection has produced a race that overpopulates and makes war and dominates and rapes, and you want to know about wisdom! Natural selection doesn’t select for wisdom!”

Sheri S. Tepper (1929–2016) American fiction writer

Source: Gibbon's Decline & Fall (1996), Chapter 11 (p. 194)

John Maynard Smith photo

“Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is the only workable explanation that has ever been proposed for the remarkable fact of our own existence, indeed the existence of all life wherever it may turn up in the universe.”

John Maynard Smith book The Theory of Evolution

Source: The Theory of Evolution (1958), p. xv.

Lee Smolin photo

“The relational picture of space and time has implications that are as radical as those of natural selection, not only for science but for our perspective on who we are and how we came to exist in this evolving universe of relations.”

Lee Smolin book Three Roads to Quantum Gravity

Three Roads to Quantum Gravity (2000)

Roger Wolcott Sperry photo

“The centermost processes of the brain with which consciousness is presumably associated are simply not understood. They are so far beyond our comprehension that no one I know of has been able to imagine their nature.”

Roger Wolcott Sperry (1913–1994) American neuroscientist

As quoted in Genius Talk : Conversations with Nobel Scientists and Other Luminaries (1995) by Denis Brian ISBN 0306450895

Francis Galton photo

“One of the effects of civilization is to diminish the rigour of the application of the law of natural selection.”

Francis Galton (1822–1911) British polymath: geographer, statistician, pioneer in eugenics

"Hereditary Talent and Character" in MacMillan's Magazine Vol. XII (May - October 1865), p. 326.
Other works
Context: One of the effects of civilization is to diminish the rigour of the application of the law of natural selection. It preserves weakly lives that would have perished in barbarous lands.

Thomas Henry Huxley photo

“It cannot be doubted, I think, that Mr. Darwin has satisfactorily proved that what he terms selection, or selective modification, must occur, and does occur, in nature; and he has also proved to superfluity that such selection is competent to produce forms as distinct, structurally, as some genera even are. If the animated world presented us with none but structural differences, I should have no hesitation in saying that Mr. Darwin has demonstrated the existence of a true physical cause, amply competent to account for the origin of living species, and of man among the rest.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

Source: 1860s, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863), Ch.2, p. 126

Hugo De Vries photo

“To put it in the terms chosen lately by Mr. Arthur Harris in a friendly criticism of my views: "Natural selection may explain the survival of the fittest, but it cannot explain the arrival of the fittest."”

Hugo De Vries (1848–1935) Dutch botanist

Concluding sentence of his work Species and Varieties: Their Origin by Mutation (1904), The Open Court Publishing Company, Chicago, p. 826.

Related topics