Why do reporters have to dig into people's privacy?” she fumed. "Communication is much like sex.” This set her back. "I don't understand...” A chuckle. "Being celibate is often wise and prudent. People know this, but the inborn drive to reproduce makes their organs wag. Keeping silent is often wise and prudent. People know this, also, but the drive to question and tell makes their tongues wag. Sex spreads genetic material, good and bad; prying spreads information, true and false; natural selection takes over and both ethical failings contribute to continuing evolution.
Sheri S. TepperRelated topics
bad celibate chuckle communication dig drive ethical evolution false good keeping natural question selection set silent tell wiseRelated quotes
If the world is an aggregate of relatively independent regions, then any assumption of universal laws is false and a demand for universal norms tyrannical: only brute force (or seductive deception) can then bend the different moralities so that they fit the prescriptions of a single ethical system. And indeed, the idea of universal laws of nature and society arose in connection with a life-and-death battle: the battle that gave Zeus the power over the Titans and all other gods and thus turned his laws into the laws of the universe.
Paul Karl Feyerabend
The giraffe's neck supposedly supplies a crucial example for preferring natural selection over Lamarckism as a cause of evolution. But Darwin himself (however wrongly by later judgement) did not deny the Lamarckian principle of inheritance for characters acquired by use or lost by disuse. He regarded the Lamarckian mechanism as weak, infrequent, and entirely subsidiary to natural selection, but he accepted the validity of evolution by use and disuse. Darwin does speculate about the adaptive advantage of giraffe's necks, but he cites both natural selection and Lamarckism as probable causes of elongation.
Stephen Jay Gould
The problem lay buried, unspoken for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban housewife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night, she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question - "Is this all?”.
Betty Friedan
Henry Fairfield Osborn, the dominant paleontologist of his era, and long time director of the American Museum of Natural History, gave the "standard version in his popular book of 1918, The Origin and Evolution of Life... "Lamarck attributed the lengthening of the [giraffe's] neck to the inheritance of bodily modifications caused by the neck-stretching habit. Darwin attributed the lengthening of the neck to the constant selection of individuals and races which were born with the longest necks. Darwin was probably right."
Stephen Jay Gould
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