Variation Quotes
More Variation Quotes
"Sexual reproduction exists solely as a means to defeat parasites. By mixing male and female genes, sex produces offspring not exactly like either the male or female making each generation different from the last, and presenting a moving target to intruders intent on compromising this system. ... Even with this variation, parasites continue to pose a threat... and parasitism evolves and moves through any system not just living things. The less variation there is in a system, the more readily parasites will evolve to infest it..."
daniel suarez— Chapter 31: Red Queen Hypothesis, Character: Sobol
I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection, in order to mark its relation to man's power of selection.
— 1859 The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, ch.3.
Uncontrolled variation is the enemy of quality.
w. edwards deming— Attributed to Edward Deming (1980) in: Chang W. Kang, Paul H. Kvam (2012) Basic Statistical Tools for Improving Quality. p.19
They’ve offered me every variation on Audrey Horne, none of which were as good or as much fun.
sherilyn fenn— Sherilyn Fenn, quoted in "Fenn de Siècle", by Joshua Mooney. Movieline (USA). July 1993. p.36-40, 80-82.
— on being typecast after starring as Audrey Horne in Twin Peaks.
Those humble but indomitable workers, to whom later generations referred by the collective name of Baale Masorah, Masters of Tradition, performed in obscurity their Herculean task of guarding the Biblical Text against loss or variation.
robert gordis— "The Biblical Text in the Making", p.1
In 'pure' instrumental music, the strategies chosen by composers to create unity were responsive to the tenets of Romanticism...Even in the absence of an explicit program, motivic continuity created a kind of narrative coherence. Like the chief character in a novel, the 'fortunes' of the main motive – its development, variation, and encounters with other 'protagonists' – served as a source of constancy throughout the unfolding of the musical process.
leonard b. meyer— Style and Music: Theory, History, and Ideology (1989)
If, however, one factor is too successful, it will continue to be the winning factor regardless of the variation in the other factors over the range of variation in the conditions, and therefore will stifle the development of other advantageous factors until the conditions change sufficiently that it no longer is the winning factor. At this point, the whole population is ill prepared for the change, and may well perish entirely if the winning factor accidentally becomes the matching factor for a disease or a predator.
erik naggum— Re: O'reilly subjugated to the Lisp juggenaut (Usenet article)
Laughing at the clueless mouthfarts of cute twenty somethings who spent their high-school years with vocal coaches or plastic surgeons is another variation on the theme "Are we getting dumber?"
laura penny— Chapter six, More is Less, p. 184
Western civilization presents one of the most difficult tasks for historical analysis, because it is not yet finished, because we are a part of it and lack perspective, and because it presents considerable variation from our pattern of historical change.
carroll quigley— Chapter 10, Western Civilization, p. 333-334
The variation in the value of money, however great, makes no difference in the rate of profits;...
David Ricardo— Chapter I, On Value, p. 32
Based upon evidence such as already presented, it appears feasible to set up criteria by which to determine when assignable causes of variation in quality have been eliminated so that the product may then be considered to be controlled within limits. This state of control appears to be, in general, a kind of limit to which we may expect to go economically in finding and removing causes of variability without changing a major portion of the manufacturing process as, for example, would be involved in the substitution of new materials or designs.
walter a. shewhart— Shewhart, Walter A. (1931). Economic control of quality of manufactured product. D. Van Nostrand Company. p. 24.
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— "Another philosopher proclaims a nonexistent “crisis” in evolutionary biology" September 7, 2012
Throughout his last half-dozen books, for example, Arthur Koestler has been conducting a campaign against his own misunderstanding of Darwinism. He hopes to find some ordering force, constraining evolution to certain directions and overriding the influence of natural selection. […] Darwinism is not the theory of capricious change that Koestler imagines. Random variation may be the raw material of change, but natural selection builds good design by rejecting most variants while accepting and accumulating the few that improve adaptation to local environments.
stephen jay gould— "Double Trouble", pp. 38–40
Although sexual theorists might like simple, parsimonious, conceptualization of sexual orientation and sexual identity or unidirectional theories of sexual behaviour. Recent studies of various groups in the United States show that simple conceptualizations of sexual orientation and sexual identity development do not accurately reflect the rich variation in behaviour or self-classification.
— Michaeal R. Stevenson, Reconciling Sexual Orientation, from The Sex Scientists 1998
I believe that Anarchism and Socialism are both needed in human society that they represent two strong trends in human psychology the trend toward liberty and individual variation, and the trend toward cooperation, sympathy and solidarity , and that therefore they should work together. Socialism greatly needs Anarchism as a critic and to keep it from sacrificing the individual and his originality to the domination of the mass.
— John William Lloyd, in Anarchist Socialism (c. 1914-8), published in Liberty, Vol. 19, No. 6 (June 2005), p. 41
I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection.
charles darwin— Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (1859), Chapter III
variation does not mean evolution. If an artist varies his mode of expression this only means that he has changed his manner of thinking, and in changing, it might be for the better or it might be for the worse.
pablo picasso— p. 391 ("Picasso Speaks," 1923)
The concept of evolution as proceeding through the gradual transformation of masses of individuals by the accumulation of impalpable changes is one that the study of genetics shows immediately to be false. Once for all, that burden so gratuitously undertaken in ignorance of generic physiology by the evolutionists of the last century may be cast into oblivion. For the facts of heredity and variation unite to prove that genetic variation is a phenomenon of individuals.
— Chapter XV, p. 289. (Mendel's Principles of Heredity (1913))
Variations in individual "educational attainment" (essentially, whether students complete high school or college) cannot be attributed to inherited genetic differences. That is the finding of a new study reported in Science magazine (Rietveld et al. 2013). According to this research, fully 98% of all variation in educational attainment is accounted for by factors other than a person’s simple genetic makeup.
— Jonathan Latham, Political Paralysis and the Genetics Agenda, CounterPunch, 2013.08.08
