Mutational Quotes & Sayings

All health, beauty, intelligence, and social grace has been teased from a vast butcher's yard of unbounded carnage, requiring incalculable eons of massacre to draw forth even the subtlest of advantages. This is not only a matter of the bloody grinding mills of selection, either, but also of the innumerable mutational abominations thrown up by the madness of chance, as it pursues its directionless path to some negligible preservable trait, and then - still further - of the unavowable horrors that 'fitness' (or sheer survival) itself predominantly entails. We are a minuscule sample of agonized matter, comprising genetic survival monsters, fished from a cosmic ocean of vile mutants, by a pitiless killing machine of infinite appetite. (This is still, perhaps, to put an irresponsibly positive spin on the story, but it should suffice for our purposes here.) — Nick Land

the greatest mutational health hazard in the population is fertile old men. Thankfully, uniparental inheritance means that men don't pass on their mitochondria at all. — Nick Lane

Men are even worse: a hundred rounds of cell division are needed to make sperm, with each round linked inexorably to more mutations. Because sperm production goes on throughout life, round after round of cell division, the older the man, the worse it gets. As the geneticist James Crow put it, the greatest mutational health hazard in the population is fertile old men. — Nick Lane

This guy had more lines than loose-leaf. — Cara Lynn Shultz

You're stronger, and you're better, and you're
ready for whatever. — Alicia Keys

The biggest problem with life is that it's just daily. — Rich Mullins

Television is the soma of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. — Robert MacNeil

We're the last billionth of a second in the evolution of matter. — Don DeLillo

The obscure unease that Pluto has always inspired, a dog owned by a mouse, daily confronted with the mutational horror of Goofy. — Michael Chabon

Yeah, tell me I'm a bottle of single malt scotch, she thought. That's the way to my heart. — L.J.Smith

Man has been evolved and created the gods. Evolved more and decided to destroy all of them. — Emil A. Zafirov

Our habits and our institutions, from language to cities, are constantly changing, and the mechanism of change turns out to be surprisingly Darwinian: it is gradual, undirected, mutational, inexorable, combinatorial, selective and in some vague sense progressive. — Matt Ridley