“Mutation may be random, but selection definitely is not.”

— Richard Dawkins , book Climbing Mount Improbable

Source: Climbing Mount Improbable (1996), Chapter 3, “The Message from the Mountain” (p. 82)

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Richard Dawkins 322

English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author 1941

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“For the record, natural selection is a highly nonrandom process that acts on the genetic variation produced by random mutation and genetic drift and results in those organisms with more adaptive traits differentially surviving and reproducing.”

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“Natural selection eliminates and maybe maintains, but it doesn't create… Neo-Darwinists say that new species emerge when mutations occur and modify an organism. I was taught over and over again that the accumulation of random mutations led to evolutionary change [which] led to new species. I believed it until I looked for evidence.”

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“Although random mutations influenced the course of evolution, their influence was mainly by loss, alteration, and refinement… Never, however, did that one mutation make a wing, a fruit, a woody stem, or a claw appear. Mutations, in summary, tend to induce sickness, death, or deficiencies. No evidence in the vast literature of heredity changes shows unambiguous evidence that random mutation itself, even with geographical isolation of populations, leads to speciation.”

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“Protoplasm is protean; any simple protoplasm can become any complex form of life under mutation and selection.”

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“We are embedded in the great evolutionary story of planet Earth, the spare, elegant process of mutation and selection and bricolage. And this means that we are anything but alone.”

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“Seasonal Fires: Selected and New Poems (Seven Stories Press, NYC, 2006); also published as Seasonal Fires: Selected and New Poems (Umuzi, Random House, South Africa, 2006)”

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“Mutation may be random, but selection definitely is not.”

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