Evolution Quotes

The debate that has been conducted in terms of "creation versus evolution" has gotten caught up with...

A red dragonfly hovers above a backwater of the stream, its wings moving so fast that the eye sees n...

The franchise and the virus work on the same principle, what thrives in one place will thrive in ano...

People cited violation of the First Amendment when a New Jersey schoolteacher asserted that evolutio...

The gravitational waves of the first detection were generated by a collision of black holes in a gal...

Far from being the smartest possible biological species, we are probably better thought of as the st...

I'm doing now with cornets exactly what I used to do with trilobites: measuring, analyzing and catal...

The idea that you have to avoid teaching evolution or pretend you're not teaching it is unique in th...

They grew up, moulded by the harsh or kindly pressure of their fellows, to be either well nurtured, ...

Every now and then a man's mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to i...

If only we could have talked to you, the hive-queen said in Ender's words. But since it could not be...

If there were no goodness in people, mankind would still be confined to loping across a Savannah som...

The evolution of man is slow. The injustice of men is great.

I mean to say, I know perfectly well that I've got, roughly speaking, half the amount of brain a nor...

The principle chore of brains is to get the body parts where they should be in order that the organi...

The alternative to thinking in evolutionary terms is not to think at all.

Our ancestors lived in groups of no more than a few hundred people, and those on the other side of a...

Cheats prosper until there are enough who bear grudges against them to make sure they do not prosper...

Evolution has no moral direction. An evolutionary understanding of human nature can explain the diff...

Retrograde time is forward time which has passed the turning point; then as it turns back it is frei...

One of the truly bizarre things about our current cultural situation is that the leading figures of ...

I approach the creation-evolution dispute not as a scientist but as a problem of law, which means am...

A second point that caught my attention was that the very persons who insist upon keeping religion a...

Biochemists assume that the three cellular kingdoms evolved from a single common ancestor, because t...

In the end, only the truth will survive.

It is the destiny of things real to destroy those that are artifice.

It seems to me that the Russian prestige is declining and that America holds in its hands the immedi...

(Evolution) general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow and which ...

We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought o...

It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose should now be threatened by the ...

Nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself shall not be defended.

Does not… the ear of Handel predict the witchcraft of harmonic sound?

Every song has a composer, every book has an author, every car has a maker, every painting has a pai...

Darwin theorized that mankind (both male and female) evolved alongside each other over millions of y...

The story of evolution unfolds with increasing levels of abstraction.

Recall the metaphor I used in chapter 4 relating the random movements of molecules in a gas to the r...

The evolution of animal behavior does constitute a learning process, but it is learning by the speci...

Of course in science there are things that are open to doubt and things need to be discussed. But am...

All life, all intelligence, all creativity and all 'design' anywhere in the universe, is the direct ...

If you were to actually travel around schools and universities and listen in on lectures about evolu...

Evolution by natural selection is the explanation for why we exist. It is not something to guide our...

Evolution by natural selection is the explanation for why we exist. It is not something to guide our...

It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that ...

Evolution never looks to the future.

There was something built into the human brain by natural selection which was once useful, and which...

A biochemist colleague has kindly provided me with a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, and enough hydroqu...

The chicken is only an egg’s way for making another egg.

We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realize that we are apes.

If the second dinosaur to the left of the tall cycad tree had not happened to sneeze and thereby fai...

I am fascinated by the evolution of language, and how local versions diverge to become dialects like...

Dan Nilsson even remarks of compound eyes that ‘It is only a small exaggeration to say that evolutio...

The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. Duri...

[W]e can calculate our way into regions of miraculous improbability far greater than we can imagine ...

The arms race between [predators] and [prey] is asymmetric, in which success on either side is felt ...

The long-lived gene as an evolutionary unit is not any particular physical structure but the textual...

What we can imagine as plausible is a narrow band in the middle of a much broader spectrum of what i...

[W]e may now be on the threshold of a new kind of genetic takeover. DNA replicators built 'survival ...

Evolution has no long-term goal. There is no long-distance target, no final perfection to serve as a...

Darwin singled out the eye as posing a particularly challenging problem: 'To suppose that the eye wi...

[W]e may now be on the threshold of a new kind of genetic takeover. DNA replicators built 'survival ...

Things exist either because they have recently come into existence or because they have qualities th...

Evolutionary psychologists suggest that, just as the eye is an evolved organ for seeing, and the win...

Natural selection is not only a parsimonious, plausible and elegant solution; it is the only workabl...

However statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by invoking a designer, the designer...

That scientifically savvy philosopher Daniel Dennett pointed out that evolution counters one of the ...

When challenged by a zealous Popperian to say how evolution could ever be falsified, J. B. S. Haldan...

Maybe scientists are fundamentalist when it comes to defining in some abstract way what is meant by ...

Darwin himself said as much: 'If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could...

In a designed economy there would be no trees, or certainly no very tall trees: no forests, no canop...

The best scientists can do is fail to disprove things while pointing to how hard they tried

Even if not a single fossil has ever been found, the evidence from surviving animals would still ove...

Even if it were true that evolution, or the teaching of evolution, encouraged immorality that would ...

Why would an all-powerful creator decide to plant his carefully crafted species on islands and conti...

Oxygen flooded into the atmosphere as a pollutant, even a poison, until natural selection shaped liv...

We think we know that chimpanzees are higher animals and earthworms are lower, we think we've always...

Evolution could so easily be disproved if just a single fossil turned up in the wrong date order. Ev...

Despite the Great Chain of Being's traditional ranking of humans between animals and angels, there i...

My main reason for scepticism about the Huxley/Sagan theory is that the human brain is demonstrably ...

What, after all, is so special about genes? The answer is that they are replicators. The laws of phy...

All life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities

What shall it profit a male if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his immortal genes?

The essential quality that an entity needs, if it is to become an effective gene vehicle, is this. I...

We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known...

It requires a deliberate mental effort to turn biology the right way up again, and remind ourselves ...

I am an enthusiastic Darwinian, but I think Darwinism is too big a theory to be confined to the narr...

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because th...

Рассмотрим представление о Боге. Мы не знаем, как оно возникло в мимофонде. Возможно, оно возникало ...

Random chance is not sufficient to explain random chance. ~Jubal Harshaw

Many older physicians had gone to their graves calling Pasteur a liar, a fool, or worse---and withou...

But one way or another competing and weeding takes place . . . or a race goes downhill.

The Universe was a damned silly place at best . . . but the least likely explanation for its existen...

We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what ...

Certainly it's a rare glimpse into the lives of the Secular Ancients. They don't seem as bad as the ...

It is hard for us to imagine now, but our earliest human ancestors who ventured out onto the grassla...

Animals are locked in a perpetual present. They can learn from recent events, but they are easily di...

Our earliest ancestors were descended from primates who thrived for millions of years in a treetop e...

When our earliest human ancestors left the trees and moved to the open grasslands of the savanna, th...

n the treetops, this powerful vision was built for speed—seeing and reacting quickly. On the open gr...

It is hard for us to imagine now, but our earliest human ancestors who ventured out onto the grassla...

Animals are locked in a perpetual present. They can learn from recent events, but they are easily di...