Stephen Baxter - Selection Quotes

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Relentless Pleistocene selection was shaping everything that would make up humanity. Even love was a by-product of evolution. Love, and the pain of loss.

Stephen Baxter

There was no design in this: no sense of improvement, of purpose. All that was happening was that each organism was struggling to preserve itself, its offspring, and its kin. But as the environment slowly changed, so through relentless selection did the species that inhabited it. It was not a process fueled by life, but by death: the elimination of the less well adapted, the endless culling of inappropriate possibilities. But the potential of an unseen future was no consolation to those who lived through the relentless culling.

Stephen Baxter

The rodents' vast litters incidentally offered up much raw material to the blind sculptors of natural selection; their evolutionary rate was ferocious.

Stephen Baxter