Category: Uncategorized

NO GREAT BLUEPRINT. "Evolution doesn't have plans, so it doesn't make mistakes. It does neither right things nor wrong things. It merely does things. If it did have intentions, then it would have a very strange sense of humor." https://lnkd.in/d5-KVFK View in LinkedIn

NATURE IS ALWAYS IMPROVING. "In living bodies, variation will cause the slight alterations, generation will multiply them almost infinitely, and natural selection will pick out with unerring skill each improvement. Let this process go on for millions of years; and during each year on millions of individuals of many kinds." (Darwin). http://www.bartleby.com/11/6004.html View in LinkedIn

COULD-BE-WORSE-PERFECTION. "Nor ought we to marvel if all the contrivances in nature be not, as far as we can judge, absolutely perfect; and if some of them be abhorrent to our ideas of fitness...The wonder indeed is, on the theory of natural selection, that more cases of the want of absolute perfection have not been observed." (Darwin). https://lnkd.in/dWKSysJ View in LinkedIn

CONTEXTUAL PERFECTION. "The kind of perfection that Darwin sees in nature is a kind of temporary, fluctuating perfection that exists between different beings and between beings and their environment." https://lnkd.in/dWKSysJ View in LinkedIn

RELATIVE PERFECTION. "In searching for the gradations through which an organ in any species has been perfected, we ought to look exclusively to its lineal progenitors. But the state of the same organ in distinct classes may incidentally throw light on the steps by which it has been perfected." (Darwin). https://lnkd.in/d97MFVz View in LinkedIn

SELF-SELECTING ERRORS. "During the formation of a crystal, certain kinds of lattice imperfections usually replicate as a necessary part of the crystallization process. In so far as those imperfections that replicate are thus self-selecting, any crystallization process is likely to involve a rudimentary biological evolution. Under simple laboratory conditions, such evolution would be limited by the absence of any selection pressure for the elaboration of very complex imperfection patterns." https://lnkd.in/dDfWeDF View in LinkedIn

DARWIN'S RELATIVE PERFECTION. "Certainly he does not believe that any current species is perfect, but he frequently cites a kind of relativistic perfection. “How have all those exquisite adaptations of one part of the organisation to another part, and to the conditions of life, and of one distinct organic being to another being, been perfected?” https://lnkd.in/dWKSysJ View in LinkedIn

CRYSTAL DEFECTS are common, and the perfect crystal does not exist. https://lnkd.in/di6Db2a View in LinkedIn

PERFECT ADAPTATION. "Thus I can understand how a flower and a bee might slowly become, either simultaneously or one after the other, modified and adapted in the most perfect manner to each other, by continued preservation of individuals presenting mutual and slightly favourable deviations of structure." (Darwin, 1859). http://jxb.oxfordjournals.org/content/60/11/2957.full.pdf View in LinkedIn

SPIDER DEAD-ENDS. "In the short term, inbreeding is expected to result in the expression of recessive deleterious alleles with the consequent reduction in fitness (i.e., inbreeding depression) of the offspring of close relatives. Further, even after the most damaging recessive deleterious alleles have been removed from a population due to repeated cycles of inbreeding, inbred individuals are expected to suffer from reduced fitness due to loss of heterosis." https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Leticia_Aviles/publication/259116856_The_Evolution_of_Inbred_Social_Systems_in_Spiders_and_Other_Organisms_From_Short-Term_Gains_to_Long-Term_Evolutionary_Dead_Ends/links/00b4952a0304203a9d000000.pdf View in LinkedIn