Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of the watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker. Richard Dawkins
I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term Natural Selection. Charles Darwin
Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous. Barbara Ehrenreich
Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection determined the evolution of cultures in the same manner as it did that of species. Konrad Lorenz
This survival of the fittest which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr. Darwin has called ‘natural selection’, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life. Herbert Spencer