“The rodents’ vast litters incidentally offered up much raw material to the blind sculptors of natural selection; their evolutionary rate was ferocious.”

Source: Evolution (2002), Chapter 5 “The Time of Long Shadows” section III (p. 132)

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author 1957

Michael T. Hannan (1943) US-American sociologist of Stanford University

Source: Organizational ecology, 1989, p. 19

“[A]lthough species may be discrete, they have no immutable essence. Variation is the raw material of evolutionary change. It represents the fundamental reality of nature, not an accident about a created norm. Variation is primary; essences are illusory. Species must be defined as ranges of irreducible variation.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Flamingo's Smile

"Of Wasps and WASPs", p. 160
The Flamingo's Smile (1985)

“Processing the human raw material is naturally more complicated than processing lumber.”

Maxim Gorky (1868–1936) Russian and Soviet writer

The I.V.Stalin White Sea - Baltic Sea Canal (1934)

“Techniques are performed upon raw materials. The state of art of analyzing the characteristics of the raw materials is likely to determine what kind of technology will be used. (Tools are also necessary, of course, but by and large, the construction of tools is a simpler problem than the analysis of the nature of the material and generally follows the analysis.) To understand the nature of the material means to be able to control it better and achieve predictability and efficiency in transformation. We are not referring here to the 'essence of the material, only the way the organization perceives it to be … The other relevant characteristic of the raw material, besides the understandability of Its nature, is Its stability and variability; that is, whether the material can be treated in a standardized fashion or whether continual adjustment to it is necessary. Organizations uniformly seek to standardize their raw material In order to minimize exceptional situations. This is the point of de-individualizing processes found in military academies, monasteries and prisons, and the superiority of the synthetic shoe material Corfam over leather.”

Charles Perrow (1925–2019) American sociologist

Source: 1960s, "A Framework for the Comparative Analysis of Organizations", 1967, p. 195

“Fortunately, a sculptor's style and aim are, to a great extent, dictated to him by his materials. To make a sculpture seem at all moving or inspiring, an artist must, of course, be gifted with a certain personality that speaks movingly through the subject and materials of his work. But he must select appropriate materials, and use them appropriately, too... My materials often dictate my change of aims, and I choose to work in a different material much as a man may suddenly feel an appetite for a change in diet.”

Ossip Zadkine (1890–1967) French sculptor

c. 1960
Source: 1960 - 1968, Dialogues – conversations with.., quotes, c. 1960, pp. 154-155

“History and geology show what an eyeblink it’s been since our current, comfortable culture came about. And yet that culture is using up absolutely everything at a ferocious rate.”

David Brin book Earth

Afterword (p. 656)
Earth (1990)

“The most important feature of natural selection is that it is a process of drift. Evolution has no end-point or direction, so if the development of society is an evolutionary process it is one that is going nowhere.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

An Old Chaos: Humanism and Flying Saucers (p. 78)
The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (2013)

“Light and space … are the sculptor's materials as much as wood or stone … I feel that I can relate my work more easily, in the open air, to the climate and the landscape.”

Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) English sculptor

1947 - 1960
Source: Interview in Dialogues on Art, Edouard Roditi; London, 1960, pp. 91–92

“Theism (whether Christian, Jewish, or Muslim) holds that God by wisdom created the world. The origin of the world and its subsequent ordering thus results from the designing activity of an intelligent agent—God. Naturalism, on the other hand, allows no place for intelligent agency except at the end of a blind, purposeless material process. Within naturalism, any intelligence is an evolved intelligence. Moreover, the evolutionary process by which any such intelligence developed is itself blind and purposeless. As a consequence, naturalism makes intelligence not a basic creative force within nature but an evolutionary byproduct. In particular, humans (the natural objects best known to exhibit intelligence) are not the crown of creation, not the carefully designed outcome of a purposeful creator, and certainly not creatures made in the image of a benevolent God. Rather, humans are an accident of natural history.”

William A. Dembski (1960) American intelligent design advocate

[The design revolution: answering the toughest questions about intelligent design, Downers Grove, Ill., InterVarsity Press, 2003, [BS652.D46, 2004], 2003020589, 9780830832163, http://books.google.com/books?id=sKVqpXqE0VwC] p. 8-9
2000s

“Costs of manufactured articles importantly depend on the cost of raw materials as well as labor, and the prices of many raw materials do not fluctuate directly with the labor cost of producing them.”

Charles Erwin Wilson (1890–1961) American secretary of Defence

Charles E. Wilson cited in: Ernest Dale (1950), Sources of economic information for collective bargaining. p. 36

“The rodents’ vast litters incidentally offered up much raw material to the blind sculptors of natural selection; their evolutionary rate was ferocious.”

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