#mutation

It wasn't torpor that kept her - she was often restless to the point of irritability. She simply liked to feel that she was prevented from leaving, that she was needed. ↗

— Ian Mcewan

#mutation #natural-selection #nature

Real arms races are run by highly intelligent, bespectacled engineers in glass offices thoughtfully designing shiny weapons on modern computers. But there's no thinking in the mud and cold of nature's trenches. At best, weapons thrown together amidst the explosions and confusion of smoky battlefields are tiny variations on old ones, held together by chewing gum. If they don't work, then something else is thrown at the enemy, including the kitchen sink - there's nothing "progressive" about that. At its usual worst, trench warfare is fought by attrition. If the enemy can be stopped or slowed by burning your own bridges and bombing your own radio towers and oil refineries, then away they go. Darwinian trench warfare does not lead to progress - it leads back to the Stone Age. ↗

— Michael J. Behe

#biology #darwinism #evolution #macro-evolution #macroevolution

Language thus becomes monumental because of the mutations of advertising. ↗

— Robert Smithson

#because #becomes #language #monumental #mutations

How is it that you keep mutating and can still be the same virus? ↗

— Chuck Palahniuk

#mutation #virus #change

Their books are also different. Works of fiction contain a single plot, with all its imaginable permutations. Those of a philosophical nature invariably include both the thesis and the antithesis, the rigorous pro and con of a doctrine. A book which does not contain its counterbook is considered incomplete. ↗

— Jorge Luis Borges

#borges #counterbook #imaginable-permutations #orbis-tertius #tlön

The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive. ↗

— Lionel Trilling

#aware #been #culture #function #high

Although I insist that God has always had the power to intervene directly in nature to create new forms, I am willing to be per-suaded that He chose not to do so and instead employed secondary natural causes like random mutation and natural selection. ↗

— Phillip E. Johnson

#always #am #causes #chose #create

I declare that The Beatles are mutants. Prototypes of evolutionary agents sent by God, endowed with a mysterious power to create a new human species, a young race of laughing freemen. ↗

— Timothy Leary

#freedom #freemen #music #mutant #mutation

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

#ask #comes #freedom #goods #life

In the abstract, it might be tempting to imagine that irreducible complexity simply requires multiple simultaneous mutations - that evolution might be far chancier than we thought, but still possible. Such an appeal to brute luck can never be refuted... Luck is metaphysical speculation; scientific explanations invoke causes. ↗

— Michael J. Behe

#chance #darwinism #evolution #id #intelligent-design