“Changes in the inhabitants of the earth do not reflect a constant process of improvement in the design of organisms, any more than changes in fashion over the years reflect a constant process of improvement in the quality of clothing.”

—  Steve Stewart-Williams

Source: Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Think You Know (2010), p. 173

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 "Changes in the inhabitants of the earth do not reflect a constant process of improvement in the design of organisms, an…" by Steve Stewart-Williams?
Steve Stewart-Williams photo

Related quotes

Indra Nooyi photo

“The distance between number one and number two is always a constant. If you want to improve the organization, you have to improve yourself and the organization gets pulled up with you. That is a big lesson. I cannot just expect the organization to improve if I don't improve myself and lift the organization, because that distance is a constant.”

Indra Nooyi (1955) Indian-born, naturalized American, business executive

Top 15 quotes from PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi

Masaaki Imai photo

“It is impossible to improve any process until it is standardized. If the process is shifting from here to there, then any improvement will just be one more variation that is occasionally used and mostly ignored.”

Masaaki Imai (1930) Japanese business theorist and consultant

W. Edwards Deming photo

“Quality comes not from inspection, but from improvement of the production process.”

W. Edwards Deming (1900–1993) American professor, author, and consultant

Source: Out Of The Crisis (1982), p. 29

“Enterprise architecture (EA) promotes the belief that an enterprise, as a complex system, can be designed or improved in an orderly fashion achieving better overall results than ad-hoc organisation and design. EA is a co-operative effort of designers, analysts and managers and uses enterprise models in the process… enterprise models carry meaning. This resulted in requirements for the enterprise engineering process, which—if not met—can limit the viability of the process. The analysis of the same factors resulted in requirements for improved Enterprise Modelling Tools.”

Peter Bernus (1949) Hungarian-Australian computer scientist

Peter Bernus (2003) "Enterprise models for enterprise architecture and ISO9000: 2000." Annual Reviews in Control 27.2 : 211-220.

Frank Bunker Gilbreth, Sr. photo

“The Process Chart is a device for visualizing a process as a means of improving it. Every detail of a process is more or less affected by every other detail; therefore the entire process must be presented in such form that it can be visualized all at once before any changes are made in any of its subdivisions. In any subdivision of the process under examination, any changes made without due consideration of all the decisions and all the motions that precede and follow that subdivision will often be found unsuited to the ultimate plan of operation.”

Frank Bunker Gilbreth, Sr. (1868–1924) American industrial engineer

Source: Process charts (1921), p. 3.

H. Jackson Brown, Jr. photo

“Commit yourself to constant improvement. Commit yourself to quality. Be persistent, persistent, persistent… and have a grateful heart!”

H. Jackson Brown, Jr. (1940) American writer

Fred Brooks photo

“… the organization chart will initially reflect the first system design, which is almost surely not the right one [… ] as one learns, he changes the design [… ]. Management structures also need to be changed as the system changes…”

Fred Brooks (1931) American computer scientist

The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering (1975, 1995)

Anthony Robbins photo

“Constant and Never-ending Improvement”

Anthony Robbins (1960) Author, actor, professional speaker

Source: Awaken the Giant Within (1992), p. 96; this phrase was also later used as a chapter title in The Success Principles : How to get from where you are to where you want to be (2005) by Jack Canfield, (with Janet Switzer), Ch. 20: "Commit to Constant and Never-ending Improvement", p. 164.
Context: I realized that we all need a word to anchor ourselves to the focus of Constant and Never-ending Improvement. When we create a word, we encode meaning and create a way of thinking. The words that we use consistently make up the fabric of how we think and even affect our decision making. As a result of this understanding, I created a simple mnemonic: CANI!™ (pronounced kuhn-EYE), which stands for Constant And Never-ending Improvement.

“In today's business environment, more than in any preceding era, the only constant is change. Somehow there are organizations that effectively manage change, continuously adapting their bureaucracies, strategies, systems, products, and cultures to survive the shocks and prosper from the forces that decimate their competition. They move from strength to strength, adjusting to crises that bedevil others in their industry. They are masters of Renewal. No organization can maintain excellence without renewing. No organization can strive for excellence, or even attempt to improve, without the ability to renew.”

Robert H. Waterman (1950) American writer

Source: The Renewal Factor, 1987, p. xv

Stephen Baxter photo

“There was no design in this: no sense of improvement, of purpose. All that was happening was that each organism was struggling to preserve itself, its offspring, and its kin. But as the environment slowly changed, so through relentless selection did the species that inhabited it. It was not a process fueled by life, but by death: the elimination of the less well adapted, the endless culling of inappropriate possibilities. But the potential of an unseen future was no consolation to those who lived through the relentless culling.”

Stephen Baxter book Evolution

Source: Evolution (2002), Chapter 5 “The Time of Long Shadows” section II (pp. 120-121)

Related topics