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natural selection
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  • This chap told me that they could improve a little through mutation from other causes, from new blood added by immigration, and from natural selection among the gene patterns they already own — but that is all very minor compared with the evolutionary rate on Terra and on any usual planet.†   (source)
  • His mind turned to its accustomed round of thoughts-he had touched on them indirectly in many medical works-concerning will and purposefulness as superior forms of adaptation; mimicry and protective coloring; the survival of the fittest; and the hypothesis that the path of natural selection is the very path leading to the formation and emergence of consciousness.†   (source)
  • But in a sense modern medicine has put natural selection out of commission.†   (source)
  • Secondly, that evolution was the result of natural selection.†   (source)
  • We can take some more recent examples of the way natural selection can work.†   (source)
  • Darwin could still not quite imagine how such a natural selection could take place.†   (source)
  • Is it possible that nature makes a 'natural selection' as to which individuals are to survive?†   (source)
  • By natural selection, nature will attempt to undo what man has done.†   (source)
  • But what had disconcerted the Count was when his father clarified that natural selection didn't need tens of thousands of years to take place.†   (source)
  • That is, the dire wolf may have been something entirely separate from Canis lupus, an alternative form that natural selection toyed with and discarded.†   (source)
  • Some who preferred the clarity of science adhered to the ideas of Darwin, seeing at every turn the mark of natural selection; while others opted for Nietzsche and his eternal recurrence or Hegel and his dialectic—each system quite sensible, no doubt, when one had finally arrived at the one-thousandth page.†   (source)
  • Which leaves you in the uncomfortable position of speculating on a change that cannot happen unless you already know what it will be (or have the sort of time on your hands that natural selection has).†   (source)
  • You speak of natural selection and evolution as if they were one and the same, but natural selection—the undirected survival of an individual or individuals—is merely one mechanism of evolution, and not the only one.†   (source)
  • He couldn't really come to terms with the fact that something as delicate and sensitive as an eye could be exclusively due to natural selection.†   (source)
  • It was due to natural selection in the struggle for life, in which those that were best adapted to their surroundings would survive and perpetuate the race.†   (source)
  • We can say that he 'raw material' behind the evolution of life on earth was the continual variation of individuals within the same species, plus the large number of progeny, which meant that only a fraction of them survived, the actual 'mechanism,' or driving force, behind evolution was thus the natural selection in the struggle for survival.†   (source)
  • Mixed herds of does with fawns were much more interesting to the wolves, for the percentage of injured, malformed or inferior individuals is naturally higher among the fawns, who have not yet been subjected to any prolonged period of rigorous natural selection.†   (source)
  • Now by the action of natural selection, all terrestrial plants have acquired a resisting power against bacterial diseases—they never succumb without a severe struggle, but the red weed rotted like a thing already dead.†   (source)
  • Being cowards, we defeat natural selection under cover of philanthropy: being sluggards, we neglect artificial selection under cover of delicacy and morality.†   (source)
  • But by virtue of this natural selection of our kind we have developed resisting power; to no germs do we succumb without a struggle, and to many—those that cause putrefaction in dead matter, for instance—our living frames are altogether immune.†   (source)
  • He pointed out—writing in a foolish, facetious tone—that the perfection of mechanical appliances must ultimately supersede limbs; the perfection of chemical devices, digestion; that such organs as hair, external nose, teeth, ears, and chin were no longer essential parts of the human being, and that the tendency of natural selection would lie in the direction of their steady diminution through the coming ages.†   (source)
  • And that's not all—twenty years ago he would have found in that literature traces of conflict with authorities, with the creeds of the ages; he would have perceived from this conflict that there was something else; but now he comes at once upon a literature in which the old creeds do not even furnish matter for discussion, but it is stated baldly that there is nothing else—evolution, natural selection, struggle for existence—and that's all.†   (source)
  • The mixed assemblage of idlers known to each other presently fell apart into two bands by a process of natural selection, the frequenters of Peter's Finger going off Mixen Lanewards, where most of them lived, while Coney, Buzzford, Longways, and that connection remained in the street.†   (source)
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