“Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability.”

—  Ronald Fisher

Reported by J. S. Huxley in Evolution in Action, London: Chatto and Windus, 1953.
1950s

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 is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability." by Ronald Fisher?
Ronald Fisher photo
Ronald Fisher 28
English statistician, evolutionary biologist, geneticist, a… 1890–1962

Related quotes

Richard Dawkins photo

“What is it that makes natural selection succeed as a solution to the problem of improbability, whereas chance and design both fail at the starting gate? The answer is that natural selection is a cumulative process, which breaks the problem of improbability up into small pieces. Each of the small pieces is slightly improbable, but not prohibitively so.”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

Source: The God Delusion (2006), p. 153

Richard Dawkins photo

“On natural selection: "Any entity capable of intelligently designing something as improbable as Dutchman's Pipe (or a universe) would have to be even more improbable than a Dutchman's Pipe. Far from terminating the vicious regress, God aggravates it with a vengeance."”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

Source: The God Delusion (2006), p. 146

William Lane Craig photo

“Okay, look at it this way: if the evening news has a very high probability of being accurate, then it's highly improbable that they would inaccurately report the numbers chosen in the lottery. That counterbalances any improbability in the choosing of those numbers, so you're quite rational to believe in this highly improbable event.”

William Lane Craig (1949) American Christian apologist and evangelist

[2000, The Case for Faith: A Journalist Investigates the Toughest Objections to Christianity, Lee, Strobel, Zondervan, Grand Rapids, 9780310565703, http://books.google.com/books?id=5kgb7v1qlF4C]

Steven Weinberg photo

“Considering the pervasive importance of quantum mechanics in modern physics, it is odd how rarely one hears of efforts to test quantum mechanics experimentally with high precision.…The trouble is that it is very difficult to find any logically consistent generalization of quantum mechanics. One obvious target for generalization is the linearity of quantum mechanics, but if we arbitrarily add nonlinear terms to the Schrodinger equation, how do we know that the theory we obtain will have a sensible physical interpretation? At least in part, it is the dearth of generalized versions of quantum mechanics that has made it so hard to plan experimental tests of quantum mechanics.”

Steven Weinberg (1933) American theoretical physicist

"Testing Quantum Mechanics" http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0003491689902765, Annals of Physics (1989)

“A model that unifies all types of selection (chemical, sociological, genetical, and every other kind of selection) may open the way to develop a general ‘Mathematical Theory of Selection’ analogous to communication theory… Selection has been studied mainly in genetics, but of course there is much more to selection than just genetical selection… yet, despite the pervading importance of selection in science and life, there has been no abstraction and generalisation from genetical selection to obtain a general selection theory and general selection mathematics”

George R. Price (1922–1975) American population geneticist

Price, G.R. (1995). "The nature of selection." Journal of Theoretical Biology 175:389-396 (written circa 1971)

“The giraffe's neck supposedly supplies a crucial example for preferring natural selection over Lamarckism as a cause of evolution. But Darwin himself (however wrongly by later judgement) did not deny the Lamarckian principle of inheritance for characters acquired by use or lost by disuse. He regarded the Lamarckian mechanism as weak, infrequent, and entirely subsidiary to natural selection, but he accepted the validity of evolution by use and disuse. Darwin does speculate about the adaptive advantage of giraffe's necks, but he cites both natural selection and Lamarckism as probable causes of elongation.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

"The Tallest Tale", p. 312
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

Richard Dawkins photo

“Eugenics was not inspired by Darwin's natural selection but by ancient agricultural ARTIFICIAL selection. Eugenics is UNnatural selection.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

https://twitter.com/richarddawkins/status/566866395540246528 (15 February 2015)
Twitter

Vannevar Bush photo

“The advanced arithmetical machines of the future will be electrical in nature, and they will perform at 100 times present speeds, or more.
Moreover, they will be far more versatile than present commercial machines, so that they may readily be adapted for a wide variety of operations. They will be controlled by a control card or film, they will select their own data and manipulate it in accordance with the instructions thus inserted, they will perform complex arithmetical computations at exceedingly high speeds, and they will record results in such form as to be readily available for distribution or for later further manipulation.”

Vannevar Bush book As We May Think

As We May Think (1945)

Ronald Fisher photo

“Natural Selection is not evolution.”

Ronald Fisher book The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection

Preface, opening sentence, p. vii.
The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (1930)

Related topics