Quotes about mutation

A collection of quotes on the topic of mutation, nature, selection, use.

Quotes about mutation

“Mutation is random; natural selection is the very opposite of random.”

Richard Dawkins book The Blind Watchmaker

Source: The Blind Watchmaker (1986), Chapter 2 “Good Design” (p. 41)

“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.”

Lynn Margulis (1938–2011) American evolutionary biologist

Nature, Change

“There is nothing exempt from the peril of mutation.”

Walter Raleigh (1554–1618) English aristocrat, writer, poet, soldier, courtier, spy, and explorer

Source: The Cabinet Council (published 1658), Chapter 24

“New mutations don't create new species; they create offspring that are impaired.”

Lynn Margulis (1938–2011) American evolutionary biologist

“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.”

Lynn Margulis (1938–2011) American evolutionary biologist

Source: Acquiring Genomes: A Theory Of The Origin Of Species

Death, Literature, Appearance, Change

“Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

1900s, A Free Man's Worship (1903)

Life, Freedom, Time, Personality

“It is difficult to make a general judgement about genetic modification (GM), whether vegetable or animal, medical or agricultural, since these vary greatly among themselves and call for specific considerations. The risks involved are not always due to the techniques used, but rather to their improper or excessive application. Genetic mutations, in fact, have often been, and continue to be, caused by nature itself. Nor are mutations caused by human intervention a modern phenomenon. The domestication of animals, the crossbreeding of species and other older and universally accepted practices can be mentioned as examples. We need but recall that scientific developments in GM cereals began with the observation of natural bacteria which spontaneously modified plant genomes. In nature, however, this process is slow and cannot be compared to the fast pace induced by contemporary technological advances, even when the latter build upon several centuries of scientific progress.”

Pope Francis (1936) 266th Pope of the Catholic Church

§ 133
2010s, 2015, Laudato si' : Care for Our Common Home

Nature, Universe, Animals

“Regarding social order, Fukuyama writes, "The systematic study of how order, and thus social capital, can emerge in spontaneous and decentralized fashion is one of the most important intellectual developments of the late twentieth century." He correctly attributes the modern origins of this argument to F. A. Hayek, whose pioneering contributions to cognitive science, the study of cultural evolution, and the dynamics of social change put him in the forefront of the most creative scholars of the 20th century. But Hayek's views about the "spontaneity" of social order remain controversial. In their extreme form, they imply that all deliberate efforts to manipulate social order — social engineering — are doomed to failure because the complex nature of our cultural heritage makes a complete understanding of the human condition impossible.
Hayek was certainly correct that we have, at best, a very imperfect understanding of the human landscape, but "spontaneous" it is not. What distinguishes human evolution from the Darwinian model is the intentionality of the players. The mechanism of variation in evolutionary theory (mutation) is not informed by beliefs about eventual consequences. In contrast, human evolution is guided by the perceptions of the players; their choices (decisions) are made in the light of the theories the actors have, which provide expectations about outcomes.”

Douglass C. North (1920–2015) American Economist

Douglass North in "Orders of the Day" in Reason (November 1999) http://reason.com/archives/1999/11/01/orders-of-the-day, a review of The Great Disruption : Human Nature and the Reconstruction of Social Order (1999) by Francis Fukuyama

Fashion, Failure, Understanding, Nature

“You're not mutation, you are evolution.”

Keith R. A. DeCandido (1969) American science fiction and fantasy writer

“If you ever meet a guy and you fall in love with him, but because of some weird genetic mutation he doesn't seem to return the feeling?… Wear that dress.”

Ann Brashares book Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood

Source: Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood

Love, Guy, Feeling

“The art of living has no history: it does not evolve: the pleasure which vanishes vanishes for good, there is no substitute for it. Other pleasures come, which replace nothing., nothing but mutations.”

Roland Barthes (1915–1980) French philosopher, critic and literary theorist

Source: Roland Barthes

Pleasure, Art, History

“It takes a huge effort to free yourself from memory, but when you succeed, you start to realize that you’re capable of far more than you imagined. You live in this vast body called the Universe, which contains all the solutions and all the problems. Visit your soul; don’t visit your past. The Universe goes through many mutations and carries the past with it. We call each of those mutations a ‘life,’ but just as the cells in your body change and yet you remain the same, so time does not pass, it merely changes.”

Paulo Coelho book Aleph

Aleph (2011)

Life, Soul, Imagination, Problem

“How do people stay in love, anyway? Is it a choice? Or is it like those plants we studied in biology that mutate into something new and totally different but are still part of the same plant family?”

Libba Bray Going Bovine

Source: Going Bovine

Love, People, Family, Study

“The longer he practised his craft, the more conscious he became of the dynamic of language, of speech and writing as events in themselves. The simplest and most obvious proposition, stated in the most elementary language, could so mutate itself in the mind of the reader that it could express the opposite of what the writer had intended. What he wrote as evidence for the defence could hang the man he was defending.”

Morris West (1916–1999) Australian writer

Reflection of Nicol Peters, journalist, in Ch. III
Lazarus (1990)

“I've let you teach too many science fiction classes," I said.
Dr. Identity's pupils mutated into large asterisks. "It's possible. More likely, however, I'm just a product of the future. and the future's been extinct for a long time.”

D. Harlan Wilson (1971) novelist

Dr. Identity: or Farewell to Plaquedemia (2007)

Science, Time, Future

“If there is one idea that has dominated the history of the United States, it is the idea of progress. Yet analyses of this idea are surprisingly rare. Furthermore, in spite of having been founded by a rather small revolution, the dominant dynamic of the United States has been evolutionary, through social mutation (invention), production, and selection. In this paper, therefore, I propose to look at the larger question of the nature of evolutionary change, and the conditions under which change can be identified as progress.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Kenneth Boulding et all. (1978) From Abundance to Scarcity Implications for the American Tradition https://kb.osu.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/1811/6209/FROM_ABUNDANCE_TO_SCARCITY_IMPLICATIONS_FOR_THE_AMERICA.pdf?sequence=1 1970s

History, Idea, Question, Nature

“There can be no question that Darwin had nothing like sufficient evidence to establish his theory of evolution.. . . His general theory, that all life on earth had originated and evolved by a gradual successive accumulation of fortuitous mutations, is still, as it was in Darwin’s time, a highly speculative hypothesis entirely without direct factual support and very far from that self-evident axiom some of its more aggressive advocates would have us believe.. . . One might have expected that a theory of such cardinal importance, a theory that literally changed the world, would have been something more than metaphysics, something more than a myth.”

Michael Denton book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis

Source: Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (1986), p. 69, 77, 358

Life, World, Question, Support

“A knowledge of Mendelism is recognized by me as only the ABC to the broader knowledge of heredity necessary for success in animal and plant improvement, and all variations and all mutations of every nature are responses to environment which, by repetition and combination, are slowly but surely fixed in heredity and at last made tangible, most often through the crossing of varieties, species, or genera, either by nature or that part of nature called man.”

Luther Burbank (1849–1926) American botanist, horticulturist and pioneer in agricultural science

How Plants are Trained to Work for Man (1921) Vol. 1 Plant Breeding

Nature, Knowledge, Success, Animals

“Proof that the penis is a much later development than the female vulva is found in the evidence that the male himself was a late mutation from an original female creature. For man is but an imperfect female. Geneticists and physiologists tell us that the Y chromosome that produces males is a deformed and broken X chromosome — the female chromosome. All women have two X chromosomes, while the male has one X derived from his mother and one Y from his father. It seems very logical that this small and twisted Y chromosome is a genetic error — an accident of nature, and that originally there was only one sex — the female.”

Elizabeth Gould Davis book The First Sex

The First Sex, ch. 1 - Woman and the Second Sex (1971).

Women, Sex, Error, Nature

“A man can trust his luck, but a society can’t; and cultural change, like random mutation, may make things chancier. So they have gone very slowly. At any one point in their history a hasty observer would say that all technological progress and diffusion had ceased. Yet it never has. Compare the torrent and the glacier. Both get where they are going.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Chapter 8 “Another Way into Orgoreyn” (p. 98)

History, Change

“Between 1937 and 1941, Dobzhansky went from being able to allow for the possibility of evolutionary mechanisms other than those he favored to a position in which everything that did not fit his definition of evolution was rejected.
In the midst of his outpouring of anger at and dismissal of Goldschmidt, Dobzhansky neglected to consider the fact that while Goldschmidt's systemic mutations may not have been observed, neither had the mechanisms of speculation that he, or anyone else, for that matter, had proposed. …it was and still is the case that, with the exception of Dobzhansky's claim about a new species of fruit fly, the formation of a new species, by any mechanism, has never been observed.”

Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900–1975) geneticist and evolutionary biologist

Jeffrey H. Schwartz, Sudden Origins: Fossils, Genes, and the Emergence of Species (1999)
About

Flying, Anger

“(on a line in the movie 2012) " 'The neutrinos have mutated.' Now, for the non-nerds here: neutrinos are tiny, sub-atomic, really really almost massless particles, they're released in nuclear breakdowns, like in the sun, for example. Five hundred trillion of them pass through your bodies every second. They can't mutate. Their structure is fundamental to the structure of the universe. Right? They can't just change. He might as well have gone, 'The electrons are angry'."”

Dara Ó Briain (1972) Irish comedian and television presenter

Dara Ó Briain: This is the Show (2010)

Universe, Change, Sun

“Evolution is all about processes that almost never happen. Every birth in every lineage is a potential speciation event, but speciation almost never happens, not once in a million births. Mutation in DNA almost never happens — not once in a trillion copings — but evolution depends on it. Take the set of infrequent accidents — things that almost never happen — and sort them into the happy accidents, the neutral accidents, and the fatal accidents; amplify the effects of the happy accidents — which happens automatically when you have replication and competition — and you get evolution.”

Daniel Dennett book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Breaking the Spell (2006)

Birth, Dependency, Happiness

“In Arab countries today, bin Ladenism looks like a nightmare from a bygone era. Many Arabs have discovered that the alternative to despotism is democracy, not al Qaeda. In fact, the Arab Spring became possible partly because the new urban middle classes were convinced that, by rising against despots, they wouldn’t be jumping into the fire from the frying pan. There was a time when bin Laden’s slightest utterance made the headlines in most Arab countries. Gradually, however, he came to provoke only a yawn in most places. Even the Qatari satellite-TV network al-Jazeera, which made its reputation as “bin Laden’s home TV,” stopped giving him star treatment. Left behind by developments in Arab countries, al Qaeda has gradually shed its ideological pretensions and mutated into a purely terrorist franchise. Its motto: One man, one bomb. Shut out of Arab countries, al Qaeda has been recruiting among Muslims in Europe and North America. Hundreds of European, American and Canadian Muslims have been to al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The group also has sleeper cells in some Asian countries — notably India, Thailand and the Philippines. It will also keep Pakistan high on its target list, and continue to help the Taliban in its forlorn attempt at regaining power. Yet al Qaeda is bound to fade away, as have all terrorist organizations in history — though this will take some time. Meanwhile, the major democracies should throw their support behind the Arab Spring and help it find its way to a future free of both despotism and Islamic terrorism.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

"Evil reign collapsed years before he fell" http://nypost.com/2011/05/03/evil-reign-collapsed-years-before-he-fell/, New York Post (May 3, 2011). New York Post

Way, Democracy, Home, History

“Instead of gambling on the eternal impossibility of the revolution and on the fascist return of a war-machine in general, why not think that a new type of revolution is in the course of becoming possible, and that all kinds of mutating, living machines conduct wars, are combined and trace out a plane of consistance which undermines the plane of organization of the World and the States?”

Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) French philosopher

from Dialogues with Claire Parnet, p. 147 [emphasis in original].

War, World, Thinking

“Unfortunately, the gains for imagination are not free. The protections for imagination are indiscriminate. They shield bad ideas as well as good ones—and there are many more of the former than the latter. Most fantasies lead us astray, and most of the consequences of imagination for individuals and individual organizations are disastrous. Most deviants end up on the scrap pile of failed mutations, not as heroes of organizational transformation… There is, as a result, much that can be viewed as unjust in a system that induces imagination among individuals and individual organizations in order to allow a larger system to choose among alternative experiments. By glorifying imagination, we entice the innocent into unwitting self-destruction”

James G. March (1928–2018) American sociologist

or if you prefer, altruism
March cited in: Robert I. Sutton (2002) Weird Ideas That Work: 11 1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation. p. 192

Imagination, Idea

“Avian flu, which has already killed 50 people, is only a mutation away from being transmissible from person to person. We have no immunity, no vaccines, and no cure. It is imperative that we strengthen our domestic vaccine supply, expand legal protections, encourage collaboration between the public and private sectors, and advance research and development. These initiatives will help protect us from a deadly viral outbreak that experts warn could come to our shores any day.”

Bill Frist (1952) physician, businessman, and politician

On the potential for a flu pandemic.
The Associated Press, April 12, 2005.

People, Help, Personality

“By 1999, over 880 studies suggested that some mutations might… be genetic alterations "custom tailored" to overcome emergencies.”

Howard Bloom (1943) American publicist and author

Source: Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2000), Ch.4 From Social Synapses to Social Ganglions

Study

“My quarrel with Chomsky goes back to the Balkan wars of the 1990s, where he more or less openly represented the "Serbian Socialist Party" (actually the national-socialist and expansionist dictatorship of Slobodan Milosevic) as the victim. Many of us are proud of having helped organize to prevent the slaughter and deportation of Europe's oldest and largest and most tolerant Muslim minority, in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in Kosovo. But at that time, when they were real, Chomsky wasn't apparently interested in Muslim grievances. He only became a voice for that when the Taliban and Al Qaeda needed to be represented in their turn as the victims of a "silent genocide" in Afghanistan. Let me put it like this, if a supposed scholar takes the Christian-Orthodox side when it is the aggressor, and then switches to taking the "Muslim" side when Muslims commit mass murder, I think that there is something very nasty going on. And yes, I don't think it is exaggerated to describe that nastiness as "anti-American" when the power that stops and punishes both aggressions is the United States … In some awful way, his regard for the underdog has mutated into support for mad dogs. This is not at all like watching the implosion of an obvious huckster and jerk like Michael Moore, who would have made a perfectly good Brownshirt populist. The collapse of Chomsky feels to me more like tragedy.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

"Love, Poverty and War" http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=C78DC231-4599-4745-9CA5-A398398916A0, FrontPageMagazine.com (2004-12-29): On Noam Chomsky 2000s, 2004

War, Dogs, Jerk, Way

“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.”

Ursula Goodenough book The Sacred Depths of Nature

Source: The Sacred Depths of Nature (1998), p. 75

“If the only available genes produce rather large changes, disadvantageous one at a time, then it seems to me probable that evolution will not occur in a random mating population. In a self-fertilised or highly inbred species it may do so if several mutations useful in conjunction, but separately harmful, occur simultaneously. Such an event is rare, but must happen reasonably often in wheat…”

J. B. S. Haldane book The Causes of Evolution

Source: The Causes of Evolution (1932), Ch. IV Natural Selection, p. 104.

Change, Time

“We are inescapably the result of a long heritage of learning, adaptation, mutation and evolution, the product of a history which predates our birth as a biological species and stretches back over many thousand millennia… Going further back, we share a common ancestry with our fellow primates; and going still further back, we share a common ancestry with all other living creatures and plants down to the simplest microbe. The further back we go, the greater the difference from external appearances and behavior patterns which we observe today.”

Fred Hoyle (1915–2001) British astronomer

Lifecloud: The Origin of Life in the Universe (1978), p. 15

Behavior, History, Birth, Learning

“That war in the early 1990s changed a lot for me. I never thought I would see, in Europe, a full-dress reprise of internment camps, the mass murder of civilians, the reinstitution of torture and rape as acts of policy. And I didn't expect so many of my comrades to be indifferent – or even take the side of the fascists. It was a time when many people on the left were saying 'Don't intervene, we'll only make things worse' or, 'Don't intervene, it might destabilise the region. And I thought – destabilisation of fascist regimes is a good thing. Why should the left care about the stability of undemocratic regimes? Wasn't it a good thing to destabilise the regime of General Franco? It was a time when the left was mostly taking the conservative, status quo position – leave the Balkans alone, leave Milosevic alone, do nothing. And that kind of conservatism can easily mutate into actual support for the aggressors. Weimar-style conservatism can easily mutate into National Socialism. So you had people like Noam Chomsky's co-author Ed Herman go from saying 'Do nothing in the Balkans', to actually supporting Milosevic, the most reactionary force in the region. That's when I began to first find myself on the same side as the neocons. I was signing petitions in favour of action in Bosnia, and I would look down the list of names and I kept finding, there's Richard Perle. There's Paul Wolfowitz. That seemed interesting to me. These people were saying that we had to act. Before, I had avoided them like the plague, especially because of what they said about General Sharon and about Nicaragua. But nobody could say they were interested in oil in the Balkans, or in strategic needs, and the people who tried to say that – like Chomsky – looked ridiculous. So now I was interested.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

"In enemy territory? An interview with Christopher Hitchens." http://www.johannhari.com/2004/09/23/in-enemy-territory-an-interview-with-christopher-hitchens, Interview with Johann Hari (2004-09-23): On the Bosnian War 2000s, 2004

War, People, Support, Change

““I really liked that girl.”
“Not loved, evidently,” I observed.
“N-n-no. I supposed not. Though what is love, anyway? Doesn’t it have so infinitely many kinds and degrees and mutations and quantum jumps that— Never mind.””

Poul Anderson book There Will Be Time

Source: There Will Be Time (1972), Chapter 8 (p. 83)

Love, Girl

“The attainments of the parent do not descend in the blood of his children, nor is the progress of man to be considered as a physical mutation of the species.”

Adam Ferguson book An Essay on the History of Civil Society

PART I, SECTION I.
An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767)

Children, Parent

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

Robert A. Heinlein book Beyond This Horizon

Source: Beyond This Horizon (1948; originally serialized in 1942), Chapter 13, “No more privacy than a guppy in an aquarium”, p. 126

Life

“Trump was, they concluded, sui generis, a peculiar mutation of the American political system generated by the unholy coupling of reality television and the Tea Party revolt. But Trump is not, in fact, a sport of nature. He reflects trends taking place around the world.”

John Feffer (1963) American foreign policy writer

Trumpism is here to stay: America’s neo-fascist fever dream has only just begun (2016)

World, Nature, Sport, Tea

“The remarkable similarity of metabolic pathways and gene sequences across the phyla argues strongly that all modern organisms are derived from a common evolutionary progenitor by a series of small changes (mutations), each of which conferred a selective advantage to some organism in some ecological niche.”

Albert L. Lehninger (1917–1986) American biochemist

Principles of Biochemistry, Ch. 1 : The Foundations of Biochemistry

Change

“Current evidence suggests that teosinte was first tended for its green ears and sugary pith by hunter-gatherers as an occasional rainy-season food in small “garden” populations away from its homeland, and not for its abundant grain-containing, hard fruitcases, which easily mass-collected but useless as food, are as yet unknown from the archeological record. A rare grain-liberating teosinte mutation (probably expressed in only one “founder” plant, a mazoid “Eve”), which exposed the encased grain for easy harvest, was soon recognized as useful, collected and planted (or self-planted). Thus maize was started on its way to a unique horticultural domestication that is not comparable to that of the temperate Old World mass-selected agricultural grains.”

Hugh Iltis (1925–2016) Czech-American botanist and environmentalist

[January 2000, Homeotic Sexual Translocations and the Origin of Maize (Zea mays, Poaceae): A New Look at an Old Problem, Economic Botany, 54, 1, 7–42, 10.1007/BF02866598] (quote from p. 7)

World, Food, Way, Season

“Old as the everlasting hills; immovable as the throne of God; and certain as the purposes of eternal power, against all hinderances, and against all delays, and despite all the mutations of human instrumentalities, it is the faith of my soul, that this anti-slavery cause will triumph.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

The Anti-Slavery Movement. Extracts from a Lecture before Various. Anti-Slavery Bodies, in the Winter of 1855.
1850s, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855)

God, Faith, Soul

“If the debt which the banking companies owe be a blessing to anybody, it is to themselves alone, who are realizing a solid interest of eight or ten per cent on it. As to the public, these companies have banished all our gold and silver medium, which, before their institution, we had without interest, which never could have perished in our hands, and would have been our salvation now in the hour of war; instead of which they have given us two hundred million of froth and bubble, on which we are to pay them heavy interest, until it shall vanish into air… We are warranted, then, in affirming that this parody on the principle of 'a public debt being a public blessing,' and its mutation into the blessing of private instead of public debts, is as ridiculous as the original principle itself. In both cases, the truth is, that capital may be produced by industry, and accumulated by economy; but jugglers only will propose to create it by legerdemain tricks with paper.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

ME 13:423
1810s, Letters to John Wayles Eppes (1813)

War, Truth

“You can only say Darwinian causes -- random mutation, natural selection -- even gravity is supposed to be done by that! And I would say to these people, well, how did life begin? We don't know, but it had to be by Darwinian means. Well, how did gravity begin? We don't know, but it had to be by Darwinian means. Why did it have to be that way? Why couldn't there have been an intelligent designer?”

Ben Stein (1944) actor, writer, commentator, lawyer, teacher, humorist

YouTube -- Ben Stein discusses the "Expelled" documentary, Fox News: Intelligent Journey -- Stein's New Documentary, 14 April 2008, 2008-04-23 http://youtube.com/watch?v=ck3AgSAXIgo,

Life, People, Way, Intelligence

“According to Goldschmidt, all that evolution by the usual mutations—dubbed "micromutations"—can accomplish is to bring about "diversification strictly within species, usually, if not exclusively, for the sake of adaptation of the species to specific conditions within the area which it is able to occupy." New species, genera, and higher groups arise at once, by cataclysmic saltations—termed macromutations or systematic mutations—which bring about in one step a basic reconstruction of the whole organism. The role of natural selection in this process becomes "reduced to the simple alternative: immediate acceptance or rejection." A new form of life having been thus catapulted into being, the details of its structures and functions are subsequently adjusted by micromutation and selection. It is unnecessary to stress here that this theory virtually rejects evolution as this term is usually understood (to evolve means to unfold or to develop gradually), and that the systematic mutations it postulates have never been observed. It is possible to imagine a mutation so drastic that its product becomes a monster hurling itself beyond the confines of species, genus, family, or class. But in what Goldschmidt has called the "hopeful monster" the harmonious system, which any organism must necessarily possess, must be transformed at once into a radically different, but still sufficiently coherent, system to enable the monster to survive. The assumption that such a prodigy may, however rarely, walk the earth overtaxes one's credulity, even though it may be right that the existence of life in the cosmos is in itself an extremely improbable event.”

Theodosius Dobzhansky book Genetics and the Origin of Species

Genetics and the Origin of Species (1941) 2nd revised edition

Life, Family, Hope, Imagination

“Creationists insist that mutations are very rare and are usually, if not always harmful. But the fact is that the vast majority of mutations are completely neutral. They’d have to be because, according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information, there is an overall average of 128 mutations per human zygote! So apparently, in creationist terms, “very rare” means “more than a hundred per person right from the point of conception”. Because those are just the mutations we start out with. Our cells will mutate again 30 more times over the course of our lives, and some of these subsequent mutations can be passed on to our children too –usually with no more effect than those we recognize as family traits.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism Source: "8th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TU-7d06HJSs, Youtube (March 22, 2008)

Children, Family, Time, Personality

“All novelty involves some degree of risk. The vast majority of biological mutations are said to be harmful. When, as in human affairs, enormous numbers of random possibilities are eliminated by rational choice, the chances of harm rather than good resulting are reduced, not eliminated.”

Tom Burns (1913–2001) British sociologist

Source: The Management of Innovation, 1961, p. 21

Chance

“Yes, [I spent] two long years, traveling all over the United States, all over Europe, interviewing many, many, many people who had been thrown out of their academic jobs because they taught that there was a possibility of life coming from something other than Darwinism, who thought that possibly random selection and mutations didn't account for the universe, didn't account for gravity, didn't account for why nobody had ever seen an individual species evolve -- no one's ever seen an individual species evolve!”

Ben Stein (1944) actor, writer, commentator, lawyer, teacher, humorist

YouTube -- Ben Stein discusses the "Expelled" documentary, Fox News: Intelligent Journey -- Stein's New Documentary, 14 April 2008, 2008-04-23 http://youtube.com/watch?v=ck3AgSAXIgo,

Life, People, Travel, Universe

“Why are we seeing George Bush on TV every two hours for nine or ten days at a time, like some kind of mutated Mr. Rogers clone? Something is dangerously wrong in any country where a monumentally-failed backwoods politician can scare our national TV networks so totally that they will give him anything he wants.”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

"The Bush League" (9 September 2003)
2000s

Time, Country

“Mutations are exciting. They try to fix 'em when they come out. Did you see the two-headed baby they killed last month when they tried to cut it apart? That was hilarious!”

Doug Stanhope (1967) American stand-up comedian, actor, and author

Deadbeat Hero (2004)

Baby

“[The] Third (problem with Darwinism), which I think is overwhelming, and just sort of blows the whole theory of Random Mutation out of the water, is, at least, let me say, raises big questions, that is. Assuming it all did happen by Random Mutation and Natural Selection, where did the laws of gravity come from. Where did the laws of thermodynamics come from? Where did the laws of motion and, of heat come from? Where, I guess that's the same as thermodynamics. Where did all these laws, that make it possible for the universe to function, where did they all come from? Why isn't all just chaos and everything collapsing in on itself and killing everything?”

Ben Stein (1944) actor, writer, commentator, lawyer, teacher, humorist

The Search for Truth, God and Braver Scientists in 'Expelled', 'Expelled' Press Conference Transcript, 27 March 2008, 2008-04-18 http://www.coloradoconfidential.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=3463,

Law, Question, Nature, Problem

“Making this crowd happy is the second easiest job you could ever have. First easiest… whoever gets to put Michael Jackson in a witness chair and create "reasonable doubt." How hard can that be? I don't even have a law degree and I think I could get Michael Jackson, y'know? I would just go, "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury… there he is! That's all I have. Y'all get a good look at my boy? See if you think he's capable of anything out of the ordinary. There he is." But it's a tough thing to prosecute Michael Jackson, y'know? Because everyone's entitled to a jury of their peers! You could run the vacuum up and down the gene pool 24/7 without suckin' up this much of whatever that has become. He has no peers. He's peerless. So why am I pickin' on poor little mutated Michael Jackson? Because Michael Jackson is a cautionary tale for the rest of us, folks. Michael Jackson is what happens when you keep fixin' it until it's broke!”

Richard Jeni (1957–2007) American comedian

A Big, Steaming Pile Of Me

Law, Boy, Thinking, Happiness

“The more times your cells divide, the greater the chance of mutations that lead to cancer. That is why the average oncological patient is a mature person or even a senior.”

Marek Sanak (1958) Polish scientist

Mazurek, Maria (13 May 2016): Komórki rakowe to anarchizujące potwory https://gazetakrakowska.pl/komorki-rakowe-to-anarchizujace-potwory/ar/9985395. Gazeta Krakowska (in Polish), pp. 18–19.

Chance, Time, Personality

“Islam is to be envisaged as dialectical evolution, or evolutionary mutation, in the prophetic tradition, in response to the limitations built into the structure of orthodox Christianity by its historic compromise with Roman imperialism; by its commitment to scriptural canon, creedal orthodoxy and episcopal hierarchy; and by its consequent scandalous history of schism and persecution”

Norman O. Brown (1913–2002) classicist

duly noted in the Koran
Source: "The Prophetic Tradition" (1982), p. 371

History

“Evolution does depend on mutations, and these do appear to be random. But each cumulative mutation may become significant factors for that organism once pitted against the dynamics of the environment in which they are introduced. Thus natural selection isn’t random; it’s deterministic. Many creationists will even admit this. And as some computer models have already shown, natural selection can actually even exceed the skills of human designers. In fact, natural selection can be so deterministic that it often leads to innovations which some perceive as evidence of intelligent design, and which even rationalists describe as though modified for intended benefit. Whether it is deliberately guided or not, there is definitely a system of design. But there doesn’t actually have to be any apparent intent or intelligence involved.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

"7th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8Q2Db17v5U, Youtube (February 27, 2008) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Intelligence, Nature, Appearance, Dependency

“They, economics and evolution, are both examples of a larger process, which has been at work in this part of the universe for a very long time. This is the process of the development of structures of increasing complexity and improbability. The evolutionary process always operates through mutation and selection and has involved some distinction between the genotype which mutates and the phenotype which is selected. The process by which the genotype constructs the phenotype may be described as "organization". Economic development manifesto itself largely in the production of commodities, that is, goods and services. It originates, however, in ideas, plans, and attitudes in the human mind. These are the genotypes in economic development. This whole process indeed can be described as a process in the growth of knowledge. What the economist calls "capital" is nothing more than human knowledge imposed on the material world. Knowledge and the growth of knowledge, therefore, is the essential key to economic development. Investment, financial systems and economic organizations and institutions are in a sense only the machinery by which a knowledge process is created and expressed.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Kenneth Boulding (1977) Economic Development as an Evolutionary System, Fifth World Congress of the International Economic Association, Tokyo, Aug.-Sept. 1977.
1970s

World, Idea, Knowledge, Sense

“A "new" language that differs from the rest of the crop by one or a couple features is proof positive that both what it came from and what it has become are mutations about to die. There are tens if not hundreds of thousands of such "languages" that people have invented over the years, for all sorts of weird purposes where they just could not use whatever language they were already using, could not extend it, and could not fathom how to modify its tools without making a whole new language. They never stopped to think about how horribly wasteful this is, they just went on to create yet another language called Dodo, the Titanic, Edsel, Kyoto-agreement …”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Re: Representing code as XML: the Flare Programming Language http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/ecea40eb1602ce7c (Usenet article). Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

People, Thinking

“A micromutation can produce what Goldschmidt would have described as macromutation leading to macroevolution. Since mutations in homeobox genes are inherited in the same way that earlier fruit-fly population geneticists understood the inheritance of the alleles for wing length or bristle number, we can appreciate that evolutionarily significant novelty—which, in turn, could result in the emergence of a new species—can be passed on from parent to child as easily and simply as eye color.”

Jeffrey H. Schwartz (1948) American anthropologist

p, 125
Sudden Origins: Fossils, Genes, and the Emergence of Species (1999)

Color, Way, Parent, Flying

“In Darwin's theory, you just have to substitute 'mutations' for his 'slight accidental variations' (just as quantum theory substitutes 'quantum jump' for 'continuous transfer of energy'). In all other respects little change was necessary in Darwin's theory…”

Erwin Schrödinger book What Is Life?

What Is Life? (1944)

Change

“Terror is not now, if it ever was, something that comes to us from outside. It is a part of the society in which we live. Both liberals and neoconservatives believe terrorism can be dealt with by removing its causes. The truth is less reassuring. Al-Qaeda has mutated into a decentralised, often locally based type of apocalyptic terrorism and, in this new guise, seems to be acquiring a formidable momentum.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

"Look out for the enemy within," http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/jul/10/july7.terrorism The Observer (2005-07-10)

Truth, Parting

“All things are changing; and thou thyself art in continuous mutation and in a manner in continuous destruction and the whole universe to.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

IX, 19
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book IX

Art, Universe, Change

“It is perhaps not a surprise that photography developed as a technological medium in the industrial age, when reality started to disappear. It is even perhaps the disappearance of reality that triggered this technical form. Reality found a way to mutate into an image.”

Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) French sociologist and philosopher

New millennium, Photography, or the Writing of Light, (2000)

Age, Way, Reality

“One of the most important presuppositions of Darwin's entire thesis is gradualism, the idea that mutations to the genome can cause minor variations in the organism's properties, which can be accumulated piecemeal, bit by bit, over the eons to create the complex order found in the organisms we observe.”

Stuart Kauffman (1939) American biophysicist

Source: At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity (1996), p.151. as cited in: A. Kay (2006) The Dynamics of Public Policy: Theory and Evidence. p.43

Idea

“Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. 'This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today. 'I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity. 'Respect for religion’ has become a code phrase meaning ‘fear of religion.’ Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect.”

Salman Rushdie (1947) British Indian novelist and essayist

Statement in the Wall Street Journal, Salman Rushdie: ‘I Stand With Charlie Hebdo, as We All Must’ http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2015/01/07/salman-rushdie-i-stand-with-charlie-hebdo-as-we-all-must/ (7 January 2015)

Stupidity, Fear, Religion, Art

“If Walter Garstang's suggestion is correct, and chordates did arise from a tunicate-like form by retaining the chordate features of their larval stage of development into adulthood, then the first chordates must have been affected by a regulatory mutation that kept the Manx gene activated for a longer period of time.”

Jeffrey H. Schwartz (1948) American anthropologist

p, 125
Sudden Origins: Fossils, Genes, and the Emergence of Species (1999)

Time, Adulthood

“We find in the history of ideas mutations which do not seem to correspond to any obvious need, and at first sight appear as mere playful whimsies — such as Apollonius' work on conic sections, or the non-Euclidean geometries, whose practical value became apparent only later.”

Arthur Koestler (1905–1983) Hungarian-British author and journalist

as quoted by Michael Grossman in the The First Nonlinear System of Differential and Integral Calculus (1979).
The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe (1959)

History, Idea, Appearance

“I at least had some knowledge of the warping, mutating power of the Lords of Disorder, the supernatural entities who on John Daker’s Earth would be called Arch-Demons, the Dukes of Hell. I knew that they made use of our most treasured virtues and most honoured emotions. That they were capable of almost any illusion. And that all that was keeping them from pouring forth from their stronghold to engulf so many other Realms of the multiverse was their caution, their unreadiness or unwillingness to war against the rival power of Law. But if we humans invited them to our realms, they would come.”

Michael Moorcock (1939) English writer, editor, critic

Book 2, Chapter 9 (p. 613)
The Dragon in the Sword (1986)

War, Law, Hell, Knowledge

“Stephen Jay Gould is extremely bright, inventive. He thoroughly understands paleontology; he thoroughly understands evolutionary biology. He has performed an enormous service in getting people to think about punctuated equilibrium, because you see the process of stasis/sudden change, which is a puzzle. It's the cessation of change for long periods of time. Since you always have mutations, why don't things continue changing? You either have to say that the particular form is highly adapted, optimal, and exists in a stable environment, or you have to be very puzzled. Steve has been enormously important in that sense. Talking with Steve, or listening to him give a talk, is a bit like playing tennis with someone who's better than you are. It makes you play a better game than you can play. For years, Steve has wanted to find, in effect, what accounts for the order in biology, without having to appeal to selection to explain everything—that is, to the evolutionary "just-so stories." You can come up with some cockamamie account about why anything you look at was formed in evolution because it was useful for something. There is no way of checking such things. We're natural allies, because I'm trying to find sources of that natural order without appealing to selection, and yet we all know that selection is important.”

Stuart Kauffman (1939) American biophysicist

Kauffman in: John Brockman, ed. (1995) The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution, p. 64-65. ( online http://www.edge.org/documents/ThirdCulture/i-Ch.2.html)

People, Way, Game, Optimism

“Domestication involved the initiation of production, vastly increased divisions of labor, and the completed foundations of social stratification. This amounted to an epochal mutation both in the character of human existence and its development, clouding the latter with ever more violence and work.”

John Zerzan (1943) American anarchist and primitivist philosopher and author

Elements of Refusal (1988)

“We believe that Darwinism is the real Orthodox Church, because Darwinism asks you to believe in things unseen that are incredibly unlikely. Darwinism asks us to believe that out of pure random chance, we got a cell that is as complicated as a Boeing 777. Darwinism asks us to believe that one day there was nothing but mud and ooze, and the next day there was life, and very soon after there was intelligent life. Darwinism asks us to believe that you can destroy genetic material through random mutation and natural selection and yet end up with more genetic material. We don't really ask you to believe anything that difficult; it is sort of innate in mankind to believe that there is a God, a heavenly Father and we're asking you to just follow the consequences of that and see if possibly there could be some scientific validity to that.”

Ben Stein (1944) actor, writer, commentator, lawyer, teacher, humorist

EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed, Assist Ministries News Story: EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed, 10 April 2008, 2008-04-18 http://www.assistnews.net/Stories/2008/s08040068.htm,

Life, God, Intelligence, Nature

“But this (a listing of illustrations of how the genome can change other than by mutations) doesn’t constitute a crisis—it’s a very interesting finding that shows that variation in a genome can arise by processes other than mutation of an organism’s own DNA. The disposition of that variation still must occur via either natural selection (it can be good or bad) or genetic drift (no effect on fitness). This hasn’t really changed the theory of evolution one iota, though it’s changed our view of where organisms can acquire new genes.”

Jerry Coyne (1949) American biologist

" Another philosopher proclaims a nonexistent “crisis” in evolutionary biology http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/09/07/another-philosopher-proclaims-a-nonexistent-crisis-in-evolutionary-biology/" September 7, 2012

Nature, Change

“Because the white genes are mutations of the genes of the original men of color - and males are mutations of the original females - we can finally answer the question "Is God black?"”

Luboš Motl (1973) Czech physicist and translator

The answer is "Yes, She is." http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/10/skin-color-gene.html The Reference Frame http://motls.blogspot.com/

Men, God, Color, Question

“Ionizing radiation has always been with us and will be for all foreseeable time. Our genetic system is probably well adjusted by natural selection to normal background radiation. Added radiation will increase the frequency of mutations; most of these will be harmful. Exposure to radiation in large amounts will increase malignant disease; small amounts may possibly do the same. In view of these potentially harmful effects every reasonable effort should be made to reduce the levels of ionizing radiation to which man is exposed to to the lowest levels that can reasonably be attained.”

George Beadle

in Scientific American, September 1959

Disease, Nature, Effort, Time

“The Posthumous Works of Robert Hooke M. D.,'… appeared in 1705, containing 'A Discourse of Earthquakes'… His treatise… is the most philosophical production of that age, in regard to the causes of former changes in the organic and inorganic kingdoms of nature. 'However trivial a thing,' he says, 'a rotten shell may appear to some, yet these monuments of nature are more certain tokens of antiquity than coins or medals, since the best of those may be counterfeited or made by art and design, as may also books, manuscripts, and inscriptions, as all the learned are now sufficiently satisfied has often been actually practised,' &c.; 'and though it must be granted that it is very difficult to read them and to raise a chronology out of them, and to state the intervals of the time wherein such or such catastrophes and mutations have happened, yet it is not impossible.”

Charles Lyell book Principles of Geology

Chpt.3, p. 36
Principles of Geology (1832), Vol. 1

Books, Age, Art, Nature

“Inevitably, whenever Israel takes action to protect themselves against openly genocidal Arab terror gangs, the accusations start bubbling up from antisemitic sewers that Israel is using diabolical weapons never seen before by mankind, evil chemicals that cause bizarre mutations and/or mysterious wounds.”

Charles Foster Johnson (1953) American musician

July 27, 2006 http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=21802&only

Evil

“The 19th and first half of the 20th century conceived of the world as chaos. Chaos was the oft-quoted blind play of atoms, which, in mechanistic and positivistic philosophy, appeared to represent ultimate reality, with life as an accidental product of physical processes, and mind as an epi-phenomenon. It was chaos when, in the current theory of evolution, the living world appeared as a product of chance, the outcome of random mutations and survival in the mill of natural selection. In the same sense, human personality, in the theories of behaviorism as well as of psychoanalysis, was considered a chance product of nature and nurture, of a mixture of genes and an accidental sequence of events from early childhood to maturity.
Now we are looking for another basic outlook on the world -- the world as organization. Such a conception -- if it can be substantiated -- would indeed change the basic categories upon which scientific thought rests, and profoundly influence practical attitudes.
This trend is marked by the emergence of a bundle of new disciplines such as cybernetics, information theory, general system theory, theories of games, of decisions, of queuing and others; in practical applications, systems analysis, systems engineering, operations research, etc. They are different in basic assumptions, mathematical techniques and aims, and they are often unsatisfactory and sometimes contradictory. They agree, however, in being concerned, in one way or another, with "systems," "wholes" or "organizations"; and in their totality, they herald a new approach.”

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher

Source: General System Theory (1968), 7. Some Aspects of System Theory in Biology, p. 166-167 as quoted in Lilienfeld (1978, pp. 7-8) and Alexander Laszlo and Stanley Krippner (1992) " Systems Theories: Their Origins, Foundations, and Development http://archive.syntonyquest.org/elcTree/resourcesPDFs/SystemsTheory.pdf" In: J.S. Jordan (Ed.), Systems Theories and A Priori Aspects of Perception. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science, 1998. Ch. 3, pp. 47-74.

Life, World, Way, Behavior

“The mutation of bacteria and viruses are merely hereditary fluctuations around a median position; a swing to the right, a swing to the left, but no final evolutionary effect.”

Pierre-Paul Grassé (1895–1985) French zoologist

Pierre Paul Grassé¨(1973). L'évolution du vivant: matériaux pour une nouvelle théorie transformiste. A. Michel,. p. 151
Evolution of living organisms: evidence for a new theory of transformation (1977)
Original: En somme, les mutations des Bactéries et des virus ne sont que des fluctuations héréditaires, autour d'une position moyenne, oscillation à droite, oscillation à gauche: effet évolutif final nul.

“Any new technology is an evolutionary and biological mutation opening doors of perception and new spheres of action to mankind.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 67

“There is… something which is in energy only; and there is something which is both in energy and capacity. …of relatives, one is predicated as according to excess and defect: another according to the effective and passive, and, in short, the motive, and that which may be moved… Motion, however, has not a substance separate from things… But each of the categories subsists in a twofold manner in all things. Thus… one thing pertaining to it is form, and another privation. …So the species of motion and mutation are as many as those of being. But since in every genus of things, there is that which is in entelecheia, and that which is in capacity; motion is the entelecheia of that which is in capacity… That there is energy, therefore, and that a thing then happens to be moved, when this energy exists, and neither prior nor posterior to it, is manifest. … [N]either motion nor mutation can be placed in any other genus; nor have those who have advanced a different opinion concerning it spoken rightly. …for by some motion is said to be difference, inequality, and non-being; though it is not necessary that any of these should be moved… Neither is mutation into these, nor from these, rather than from their opposites. …The cause, however, why motion appears to be indefinite, is because it can neither be simply referred to the capacity, nor to the energy of beings. …[I]t is difficult to apprehend what motion is: for it is necessary to refer it either to privation, or to capacity, or to simple energy; but it does not appear that it can be any of these. The above-mentioned mode, therfore remains, viz. that it is a certain energy; but… difficult to be perceived, but which may have a subsistence.”

Aristotle book Physics

Book III, Ch. I, pp. 137-147.
Physics

Motivation, Appearance

“Since… nature is a principle of motion and mutation… it is necessary that we should not be ignorant of what motion is… But motion appears to belong to things continuous; and the infinite first presents itself to the view in that which is continuous. …[F]requently …those who define the continuous, employ the nature or the infinite, as if that which is divisible to infinity is continuous.”

Aristotle book Physics

Book III, Ch. I, pp. 135-136.
Physics

Nature, Appearance

“[L]et us consider, with respect to causes, what they are, and how many there are in number… this also must be done by us in discoursing concerning generation and corruption, and all physical mutation… knowing the principles of these…
Cause… is after one manner said to be that, from which, being inherent, something is produced… But after another manner cause is form and paradigm (and this is the definition of the essence of a thing) and the genera of this. …But it happens… that there are also many causes of the same thing, and this is not from accident. …seed, a physician, he who consults, and, in short, he who makes, are all of them causes, as that whence the principle of mutation, or permanency, or motion is derived. …It is, however, necessary always to investigate the supreme cause of every thing …Further still, it is necessary to investigate the genera of genera; and the particulars of particulars… We should also explore the capacities of the capabilities, and the energizers of the things affected by energy.”

Aristotle book Physics

Book II, Ch. III, pp. 107-113.
Physics

“[W]hen they write incantations, and utter them as to the stars, not only to [the bodies and] souls of these, but also to things superior to soul, what do they effect? They answer, charms, allurements, and persuasions, so that the stars hear the words addressed to them, and are drawn down; if any one of us knows how in a more artificial manner to utter these incantations, sounds, aspirations of the voice, and hissings, and such other particulars as in their writings are said to possess a magical power. …They likewise pretend that they can expel disease. And if, indeed, they say that they effect this by temperance and an orderly mode of life, they speak rightly, and conformably to philosophers. But now when they assert that diseases are daemons, and that they are able to expel these by words, and proclaim that they possess this ability, they may appear to the multitude to be more venerable, who admire the powers of magicians; but they will not persuade intelligent men that diseases have not their causes either from labours, or satiety, or indigence, or putrefaction, and in short from mutations which either have an external or internal origin. This, however, is manifest from the cure of diseases. For disease is deduced downward, so as to pass away externally, either through a flux of the belly, or the operation of medicine. Disease, also, is cured by letting of blood and fasting. …The disease …[is] something different from the daemon. …The manner, however, in which these things are asserted by the Gnostics, and on what account is evident; since for the sake of this, no less than of other things, we have mentioned these daemons. …And this must every where be considered, that he who pursues our form of philosophy, will, besides all other goods, genuinely exhibit simple and venerable manners, in conjunction with the possession of wisdom, and will not endeavour to become insolent and proud; but will possess confidence accompanied with reason, much security and caution, and great circumspection.”

Plotinus (203–270) Neoplatonist philosopher

Against the Gnostics

Life, Wisdom, Men, Disease

“If much of the investigation here summarised has only proved the obvious, the obvious is worth proving when this can be done. And if the relative importance of selection and mutation is obvious, it has certainly not always been recognised as such.”

J. B. S. Haldane book The Causes of Evolution

Appendix
The Causes of Evolution (1932)
Context: Unaided common sense may indicate an equilibrium, but rarely, if ever, tells us whether it is stable. If much of the investigation here summarised has only proved the obvious, the obvious is worth proving when this can be done. And if the relative importance of selection and mutation is obvious, it has certainly not always been recognised as such.

“According to one mode… nature is thus denominated, viz. the first subject matter to every thing which contains in itself the principle of motion and mutation. But after another mode it is denominated form, which subsists according to definition: for as art is called that which subsists according to art, and that which is artificial; so likewise nature is both called that which is according to nature, and that which is natural. …that which is composed from these is not nature, but consists from nature; as, for instance, man. And this is nature in a greater degree than matter: for every thing is then said to be, when it is form in energy… entelecheia, rather than when it is incapacity.”

Aristotle book Physics

Book II, Ch. I, pp. 93-94.
Physics

Art, Nature

“There seems to be an inborn drive in all human beings not to live in a steady emotional state, which would suggest that such a state is not tolerable to most people. Why else would someone succumb to the attractions of romantic love more than once? Didn’t they learn their lesson the first time or the tenth time or the twentieth time? And it’s the same old lesson: everything in this life—I repeat, everything—is more trouble than it’s worth. And simply being alive is the basic trouble. This is something that is more recognized in Eastern societies than in the West. There’s a minor tradition in Greek philosophy that instructs us to seek a state of equanimity rather than one of ecstasy, but it never really caught on for obvious reasons. Buddhism advises its practitioners not to seek highs or lows but to follow a middle path to personal salvation from the painful cravings of the average sensual life, which is why it was pretty much reviled by the masses and mutated into forms more suited to human drives and desires. It seems evident that very few people can simply sit still. Children spin in circles until they collapse with dizziness.”

Thomas Ligotti (1953) American horror author

The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror (2010)

Pain, Time, Personality, Children

“Note that in all this interaction between mutation and natural selection, no moth is making a conscious effort to adapt to a changed environment. The process is random and statistical.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

Source: The Dragons of Eden (1977), Chapter 2, “Genes and Brains” (p. 28)

Effort, Change, Making love, Nature

“A mutation in a DNA molecule within a chromosome of a skin cell in my index finger has no influence on heredity. Fingers are not involved, at least directly, in the propagation of the species.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

Source: The Dragons of Eden (1977), Chapter 2, “Genes and Brains” (p. 27)

“When man becomes aware of the movement of his own thoughts, he will see the division between the thinker and thought, the observer and the observed, the experiencer and the experience. He will discover that this division is an illusion. Then only is there pure observation which is insight without any shadow of the past or of time. This timeless insight brings about a deep, radical mutation in the mind.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher

"The core of the teachings (1980) http://www.jkrishnamurti.org/about-krishnamurti/dissolution-speech.php 1980s

Past, Time

“If humans turn out to be near the Kondrashov limit —that is, if on average every gamete has one bad mutation created during the lifetime of its producer— it is obviously not going to be nearly enough to test a baby for the subset of the few hundreds or so of well-characterized genetic defects”

W. D. Hamilton (1936–2000) British evolutionary biologist (1936-2000)

"The Hospitals Are Coming", in Narrow Roads of Gene Land, Volume 2: Evolution of Sex (2002)

Baby, Bad luck

“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.”

John Allen Paulos (1945) American mathematician

Part 1 “Four Classical Arguments”, Chapter 2 “The Argument from Design (and Some Creationist Calculations)” (p. 19)
Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up (2008)

Nature

“Once a virus gets into an intensive poultry shed it can move quickly through the flock, constantly replicating itself. Any "errors" or changes to the genetic code during replication don't get repaired: this is how the virus mutates and new variant strains emerge. The tragedy is that while intensive farms provide ideal conditions for the emergence of new aggressive disease strains, wild birds can then become infected too. Experience from the 2005 outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza (AI) H5N1 suggests that the disease is more likely spread along major road and rail routes than on the flight routes of migratory birds.”

Philip Lymbery book Farmageddon

Farmageddon (2014)

Bird, Error, Disease, Change

“This (machine learning algorithm that can predict SARS-CoV-2 virus mutations) is a real-time companion to vaccine development. What we can do with our model right now is a lot faster than what you can do in the lab.”

Bryan Bryson researcher (ORCID 0000-0003-1716-6712)

Source: Bryan Bryson (2021) cited in " As COVID-19 Mutates, AI Algorithms Keep Pace https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-human-os/biomedical/devices/ai-predicts-most-potent-covid-19-mutations" on IEEE Spectrum, 20 January 2021.

Time, Learning

“Human beings accumulate about one hundred mutations per generation.”

Matt Ridley book Genome

Introduction (p. 10)
Genome (1999)

“Wuhan Coronavirus has three features: it is an RNA virus that mutates easily, it is more contagious than SARS, and it can spread from an asymptomatic person. This means that even someone who has recovered from the virus can transmit it, making it more difficult to curb its spread.”

Hsieh Shie-liang researcher

Source: Hsieh Shie-liang (2020) cited in " Coronavirus could be unkillable: top Taiwanese researcher https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3869848" on Taiwan News, 3 February 2020.

Personality

“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)