Três livros sobre seleção natural

I well remember the thrill when I first learned the whole system of evolutionary logic as applied to biology from Dr. [William] Drury. It was similar to the feeling I had when I first fell in love with astronomy as a twelve-year old. Astronomy gave you inorganic creation and evolution over a 15-billion-year period of time. Evolutionary logic gave you the comparable story over 4 billion years and evolutionary logic applied to life. In both cases, I felt a sense of religious awe. Astronomy spoke of vastness of time and space while evolutionary biology did the same thing for living creatures. The living world was not created 6 thousand  years ago, in one blinding flash of creation, or in seven days, perhaps. Living creatures have been forming over a 4-billion-year period of time, with natural selection knitting together adaptive traits over time. Living creatures are expected to be organized functionally in exquisite and even counterintuitive forms. In no way did this perspective diminsh my sense of awe, nor did it argue, one way or another, for the existence of an omnipotent force to which personal attention was suggested.
- Robert Trivers ("Natural selection and social theory: selected papers of Robert Trivers", 2002, Oxford University Press, p. 57)

Sometime around my early thirties I stumbled upon evolutionary biology, particularly in the form of Richard Dawkins's books The Selfish Gene and then The Blind Watchmaker, and suddenly (on, I think the second reading of The Selfish Gene) it all fell into place. It was a concept of such stunning simplicity, but it gave rise, naturally, to all of the infinite and baffling complexity of life. The awe it inspired in me made the awe that people talk about in respect of religious experience seem, frankly, silly beside it. I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.
- Douglas Adams (Interview with American Atheits)

Successful biological research in this century has had three doctrinal bases: mechanism (as opposed to vitalism), natural selection (trial and error, as opposed to rational plan), and historicity. [Historicity] is the recognition of the role of historical contingency in determining properties of the Earth's biota. (...) Mechanism implies that every physico-chemical processes are at work in an organism. Every vital function is performed by material machinery that can in principle be understood from a physical and chemical examination. (...) The second basis of modern biology is the assumption that the Darwinian process of natural selection accounts for all aspects of the adaptation of an organism to a particular way of life in a particular environment.
- George C. Williams ("Natural selection: domains, levels and challenges", 1992, Oxford University Press, pp. 3-5)