Random Variability Quotes

Common sense says that the amazing complexity of life cannot arise out of a random process. The neo-Darwinians use clever arguments to show why evolution should work and why common sense is wrong. One after the other of them has explained that although the variability occurs randomly, the selection process gives it direction and makes it nonrandom ... if the arguments were solid and correct they should have put the theory on a stable and reliable foundation. The neo-Darwinians would like everyone to believe they have done that. ~ Lee Spetner

We listen to the old radio shows. Light flares and spreads across the blue-banded edge, sunrise, sunset, the urban grids in shadow. There is a sweetness in the tenor voice of the young man singing, a simple vigour that time and distance and random noise have enveloped in eloquence and yearning. Every sound, every lilt of strings has this veneer of age. ~ Don DeLillo

My funeral," the Blue Man said. "Look at the mourners. Some did not even know me well, yet they came. Why? Did you ever wonder? Why people gather when others die? Why people feel they should?
"It is because the human spirit knows, deep down, that all lives intersect. That death doesn't just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed.
"You say you should have died instead of me. But during my time on earth, people died instead of me, too. It happens every day. When lightning strikes a minute after you are gone, or an airplane crashes that you might have been on. When your colleague falls ill and you do not. We think such things are random. But there is a balance to it all. One withers, another grows. Birth and death are part of a whole.
"It is why we are drawn to babies ... " He turned to the mourners. "And to funerals. ~ Mitch Albom

Since the dawn of time, several billion human (or humanlike) beings have lived, each contributing a little genetic variability to the total human stock. Out of this vast number, the whole of our understanding of human prehistory is based on the remains, often exceedingly fragmentary, of perhaps five thousand individuals. You could fit it all into the back of a pickup truck if you didn't mind how much you jumbled everything up, Ian Tattersall, the bearded and friendly curator of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, replied when I asked him the size of the total world archive of hominid and early human bones.
The shortage wouldn't be so bad if the bones were distributed evenly through time and space, but of course they are not. They appear randomly, often in the most tantalizing fashion. Homo erectus walked the Earth for well over a million years and inhabited territory from the Atlantic edge of Europe to the Pacific side of China, yet if you brought back to life every Homo erectus individual whose existence we can vouch for, they wouldn't fill a school bus. Homo habilis consists of even less: just two partial skeletons and a number of isolated limb bones. Something as short-lived as our own civilization would almost certainly not be known from the fossil record at all.
In Europe, Tattersall offers by way of illustration, you've got hominid skulls in Georgia dated to about 1.7 million years ago, but then you have a gap of almost a millio ~ Bill Bryson

They're a nasty bunch of people. The Riot Club's sole purpose is to celebrate wealth, elitism, hedonism, and excess - just random acts of destruction and chauvinism, which is interesting because our Prime Minister, our Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Mayor of London were are a part of this club. ~ Max Irons

It is a secret from nobody that the famous random event is most likely to arise from those parts of the world where the old adage"There is no alternative to victory" retains a high degree of plausibility. ~ Hannah Arendt

Pain comes in all forms. The small twinge, a bit of soreness, the random pain. The normal pains we live with everyday. Then there's the kind of pain you can't ignore. A level of pain so great that it blocks out everything else... Makes the rest of your world fade away, until all we can think about is how much we hurt. How we manage our pain is up to us. Pain. We anesthetize , ride it out, embrace it, ignore it, and for some of us the best way to manage pain is to just push through it. ~ Meredith Grey

What we're doing is wrong. Making it a one-time deal is wrong. Trying to convince ourselves it was dirty and tawdry and something to be ashamed of is wrong. It was the best damn sex of my life, Aspen. I felt connected to you, like hell, I don't know. I wasn't just getting off in some random girl; I was sharing something deep and meaningful…with you. I don't care how many school policies tell us no. I'm saying yes. ~ Linda Kage

For real men serve their country with random acts of kindness, not vicious acts of violence. And real soldiers have one duty, and one duty only; they have a duty to mutiny! ~ Joss Sheldon

We do not sufficiently distinguish between individualism and individuation. Individualism means deliberately stressing and giving prominence to some supposed peculiarity rather than to collective consideration and obligations. But individuation means precisely the better and more complete fulfillment of the collective qualities of the human being, since adequate consideration of the peculiarity of the individual is more conducive to a better social performance than when the peculiarity is neglected or suppressed. The idiosyncrasy of an individual is not to be understood as any strangeness in his substance or in his components, but rather as a unique combination, or gradual differentiation, of functions and faculties which in themselves are universal. Every human face has a nose, two eyes, etc., but these universal factors are variable, and it is this variability which makes individual peculiarities possible. Individuation, therefore, can only mean a process of psychological development that fulfils the individual qualities given; in other words, it is a process by which a man becomes the definite, unique being he in fact is. In so doing he does not become "selfish" in the ordinary sense of the word, but is merely fulfilling the peculiarity of his nature, and this, as we have said, is vastly different from egotism or individualism. ~ C.G. Jung

An accident, a random change, in any delicate mechanism can hardly be expected to improve it. Poking a stick into the machinery of one's watch or one's radio set will seldom make it work better. ~ Theodosius Dobzhansky

There are patterns because we try to find them. A desperate attempt at order because we can't face the terror that it might all be random. ~ Lauren Beukes

To die this way seems so random, so trivial. I have been robbed of meaning before being robbed of life. To die in darkness, alone -- for what purpose was I ever alive. It is as if I emerged from darkness into delusion, then sank back into darkness forever. ~ Carolyn Ives Gilman

If we all do one random act of kindness daily, we just might set the world in the right direction. ~ Martin Kornfeld

It's just crazy, isn't it? Here she sits at a table, like butter wouldn't melt, yet in my ear, I'm the one that's melting like butter! ~ Jimmy Tudeski

Number eight of the ten Amazon commandments: never fight an opponent face-to-face if you couldn't defeat him. Wait and stab him in the back later. ~ Gena Showalter

The best person you can be is the person you are when you are alone on a random Thursday. That's who you are. ~ Augusten Burroughs

Cabal. Cabal. Cabal. I summon you to me. Now."
Simi and Kody exchanged a look that said he was as crazy as he suddenly felt when nothing happened.
Great, Dad. I can look stupid on my own. Didn't really need you to help out on that front.
That was his thought until he heard a curse and something slammed into him, knocking him against the wall. Nick shoved his attacker away, then froze as he looked into a pair of familiar, startled brown eyes.
Now this was the giant badass-tough demon that Nick was used to.
"Malphas?"
Tense and braced to fight, Caleb turned around slowly, surveying every aspect of his new surroundings. He paused as he faced Kody and Simi. "Where the heck am I? And how did I get here?"
Kody pointed to Nick. "Apparently, Nick summoned you."
"Nick?" Caleb glanced right past Nick and kept searching the room with his gaze. "Our Nick? Where is the little booger?"
She gestured even more exaggeratedly at Nick's position. "Right there."
Caleb's jaw went slack as he faced him."Nick?"
"Caleb?"
The word had barely left his lips before Caleb grabbed him into a bear hug and held him tight. Which was extremely awkward and gross. Completely weirded out by it, Nick tried to disentangle himself from the demon. It wasn't like Caleb to show any emotion toward him other than irritation or frustration. Sometimes anger.
"Stop C! If you're going to hug me like this, you got to buy me dinner first, boy. And it's got to be ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

A random guy I met at a party I went to in high school told me not to study creative writing because in his opinion studying creative writing as a major sucks the love of writing out of you (he was a creative writing major, so he said he would know). I did not want the love of writing sucked out of me, so I followed his advice (however, I did take a few creative writing workshops at IU and I enjoyed them very much). Instead, I had the love of art sucked out of me. Years later I met that guy from the party again in New York City where I moved after college to be an illustrator, and we got married. ~ Meg Cabot

Scrum embraces the fact that in product development, some level of variability is required in order to build something new. ~ Kenneth S. Rubin

If we stand by the eagle, fish will die; if we stand by the fish, eagle will die! This dilemma has been created by the random evolutionary process. There is no goodness, there is no justice and there is no intelligence in here. We are living in a primitive and flawed order. ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Compared to them I'm pretty used to losing. There are plenty of things in this world that are way beyond me, plenty of opponents I can never beat. Not to brag, but these girls probably don't know as much as I do about pain. And, quite naturally, there might not be a need for them to know it. These random thoughts come to me as I watch their proud ponytails swinging back and forth, their aggressive strides. Keeping to my own leisurely pace, I continue my run down along the Charles. ~ Haruki Murakami

If you take 10,000 people at random, 9,999 have something in common: their interests in business lie on or near the Earth's surface. The odd one out is an astronomer, and I am one of that strange breed. ~ Martin Rees

People adopt ideas when social, personal and financial trends intersect-a confluence that may seem random but usually happens 'by design. ~ Clement Mok

Why don't you just call yourself a lesbian? Random Guy wants to know. The answer seems so obvious. Because I'm not. But he presses further and that's when the answer really becomes clear. It's more than simply the attraction to guys which has always been there, and more than the attraction to women that I'm just beginning to explore. It's about potential, about possibility, about open-mindedness, and especially about making choices based on values and individuals rather than mere gender. ~ Audrey Beth Stein

We're all made to the same pattern. Knitted up like a thrifty housewife's sock from scraps - random unravelled bits of yarn that used to make someone else, chance combinations from the hand-me-down wardrobes of dead strangers.
But surely the execution must have an effect? After all, some knit better than others. I could never master it myself. ~ Tanya Moir

Tried to escape, to block out the fact that I was being eaten alive by arachnids. For some reason the only thing I could replace it with was the image of being eaten by tiny clowns. ~ David Wong

Violence against women is not random or anonymous. In West Virginia, 88 percent of sexual-assault victims already know their attacker. In my hometown, Alicia McCormick, an advocate for our domestic-violence shelter at the YWCA, was killed in her home by a man doing handiwork in her apartment complex. That one of my greatest advocates could fall victim to something she fought against her whole life was a tragedy that moved me to action. ~ Shelley Moore Capito

I have a random array of ball markers in my bag and don't use any specific one. Many are the plastic kind you find at almost any golf course. ~ Matt Kuchar

How it feels to me, and I guess to you as well, is that the present moves from the past to the future, like a tiny spotlight, inching its way along a gigantic ruler of time. Everything behind the spotlight is in darkness, the darkness of the dead past. Everything ahead of the spotlight is in the darkness of the unknown future. The odds of your century being the one in the spotlight are the same as the odds that a penny, tossed down at random, will land on a particular ant crawling somewhere along the road from New York to San Francisco. In other words, it is overwhelmingly probable that you are dead. ~ Richard Dawkins

But remember that reading provides nourishment for hungers we might not even be aware of. How often have I chosen a book at random and found in it an answer I didn't realize I was seeking. ~ Beth Ann Fennelly

All those other summers and those other kisses and everything else we shared, my dad choosing some random lake in some random town to stay in one year, the fights and the screw ups that helped us learn and gave us experiences with other people. They were all meant to happen, and our paths were supposed to cross over and over again. Until we found that point, the bright star in the summer sky that would be ours forever. ~ Nyrae Dawn

The majority of short term trading results are just random. In the long term the money ends up with those that can trade and manage risk. ~ Steve Burns

A dictionary resembles the world more than a novel does, because the world is not a coherent sequence of actions but a constellation of things perceived. It is looked at, unrelated things congregate, and geographic proximity gives them meaning. If events follow each other, they are believed to be a story. But in a dictionary, time doesn't exist: ABC is neither more nor less chronological than BCA. To portray your life in order would be absurd: I remember you at random. My brain resurrects you through stochastic details, like picking marbles out of a bag. ~ Edouard Leve

Play is not for every hour of the day, or for any hour taken at random. There is a tide in the affairs of children. Civilization is cruel in sending them to bed at the most stimulating time of dusk. ~ Alice Meynell

But I would like to reach the point where I could cut up an illustrated magazine at random and see to it that the parts would each become a painting. I cannot properly explain it right now. Already now I am searching for the most boring and irrelevant photo material that I can find. And I would like to get to the point soon where this determined irrelevance could be retained, in favor of something that would be covered up otherwise by artifice. ~ Gerhard Richter

Liberals pretend to believe that when two random hoodlums kill a gay man in Oklahoma, it's evidence of a national trend, but when a million people buy a book, it proves absolutely nothing about the book-buying public. ~ Ann Coulter

I cry at random things, like a flower, or someone giving me a present, or my sister giving me a nice hug. ~ Naomie Harris

How funny are dogs? ~ John Marsden

As Atwood concludes after a random and informal sampling, men and women differ markedly in the 'scope of their threatenability': 'Why do men feel threatened by woman?' I asked a male friend of mine ... '[M]en are bigger, most of the time ... and they have on the average a lot more money and power.' 'They're afraid women will laugh at them,' he said. 'Undercut their world view.' Then I asked some women students in a quickie poetry seminar I was giving, 'Why do women feel threatened by men?' 'They're afraid of being killed,' they said'. ~ Shuli Barzilai

The main thing I'm into is going about on a bike, taking random routes; I'm really into the idea of making up journeys, and just seeing where they take you, because they always end up taking you someplace freaky. ~ Tom Jenkinson

That's what novels are: They're amalgams of archetypes, collections of random traits one observes in other people through life, blended into fresh characters. ~ Michael Callahan

They play strange games, games I don't recognize. They pull buttons off their clothes and exchange them back and forth, palming and concealing them and guessing which hands they're held in. Or they arrange themselves in a strange spiral pattern, marching in a loop that folds back on itself, while someone standing outside it taps people out, seemingly at random. ~ Michael Montoure

We take random events and we put them together in a pattern so we can comfort ourselves with a story, no matter how much it obviously isn't true. ~ Patrick Ness