Evolution Quotes - Page 12

• As you kind of get over the anxiety about [science and evolution], it actually adds to your sense of awe about this amazing universe that we live in, it doesn't subtract from it at all.

  Francis Collins

  Science, Anxiety, Add

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• Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.

  Francis Crick

  Science, Origin Of Life, Mind

  Francis Crick (2008). “What Mad Pursuit”, p.104, Hachette UK

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• Biology is a science of three dimensions. The first is the study of each species across all levels of biological organization, molecule to cell to organism to population to ecosystem. The second dimension is the diversity of all species in the biosphere. The third dimension is the history of each species in turn, comprising both its genetic evolution and the environmental change that drove the evolution. Biology, by growing in all three dimensions, is progressing toward unification and will continue to do so.

  E. O. Wilson

  Science, Ecosystems, Organization

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• But in science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs. Not the man who finds a grain of new and precious quality but to him who sows it, reaps it, grinds it and feeds the world on it.

  Francis Darwin

  Science, Men, Ideas

  Eugenics Review, Apr. 1914

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• But with regard to the material world, we can at least go so far as this;-we can perceive that events are brought about, not by insulated interpositions of Divine power, exerted in each particular ease, but by the establishment of general laws.

  William Whewell

  Science, Law, Events

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• Consider a cow. A cow doesn't have the problem-solving skill of a chimpanzee, which has discovered how to get termites out of the ground by putting a stick into a hole. Evolution has developed the brain's ability to solve puzzles, and at the same time has produced in our brain a pleasure of solving problems.

  Martin Gardner

  Science, Skills, Brain

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• Contrary to the legend, Darwin's finches do not appear to have inspired his earliest theoretical views on evolution, even after he finally became an evolutionist in 1837; rather it was his evolutionary views that allowed him, retrospectively, to understand the complex case of the finches.

  Frank Sulloway

  Science, Views, Legends

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• Creationists have also changed their name ... to intelligent design theorists who study 'irreducible complexity' and the 'abrupt appearance' of life-yet more jargon for 'God did it.' ... Notice that they have no interest in replacing evolution with native American creation myths or including the Code of Hammarabi alongside the posting of the Ten Commandments in public schools.

  Michael Shermer

  Native American, School, Science

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• Darwin abolished special creations, contributed the Origin of Species and hitched all life together in one unbroken procession of Siamese Twins, the whole evolved by natural and orderly processes from one microscopic parent germ.

  Mark Twain

  Life, Science, Parent

  Mark Twain (2003). “Tales of Wonder”, p.223, U of Nebraska Press

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• Darwin was a biological evolutionist, because he was first a uniformitarian geologist. Biology is pre-eminent to-day among the natural sciences, because its younger sister, Geology, gave it the means.

  Charles Lapworth

  Mean, Science, Firsts

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• Evolution advances, not by a priori design, but by the selection of what works best out of whatever choices offer. We are the products of editing, rather than of authorship.

  George Wald

  Science, Editing, Choices

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• Evolution has encountered no intellectual trouble; no new arguments have been offered. Creationism is a home-grown phenomenon of American sociocultural history-a splinter movement ... who believe that every word in the Bible must be literally true, whatever such a claim might mean.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Believe, Home, Mean

  Stephen Jay Gould (2011). “Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms”, p.270, Harvard University Press

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• Evolution is an inference from thousands of independent sources, the only conceptual structure that can make unified sense of all this disparate information.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Independent, Science, Information

  Stephen Jay Gould (1999). “Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms: Essays on Natural History”, Three Rivers Press (CA)

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• Evolutionary plasticity can be purchased only at the ruthlessly dear price of continuously sacrificing some individuals to death from unfavourable mutations. Bemoaning this imperfection of nature has, however, no place in a scientific treatment of this subject.

  Theodosius Dobzhansky

  Sacrifice, Science, Imperfection

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• Few scientists acquainted with the chemistry of biological systems at the molecular level can avoid being inspired. Evolution has produced chemical compounds exquisitely organized to accomplish the most complicated and delicate of tasks. Many organic chemists viewing crystal structures of enzyme systems or nucleic acids and knowing the marvels of specificity of the immune systems must dream of designing and synthesizing simpler organic compounds that imitate working features of these naturally occurring compounds.

  Donald Cram

  Dream, Science, Knowing

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• Fifty years from now if an understanding of man's origins, his evolution, his history, his progress is not in the common place of the school books we shall not exist.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Book, School, Science

  "'The Ascent of Man' ('The Long Childhood')". Documentary TV Mini-Series, Episode 13, 1973.

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• Five per cent vision is better than no vision at all. Five per cent hearing is better than no hearing at all. Five per cent flight efficiency is better than no flight at all. It is thoroughly believable that every organ or apparatus that we actually see is the product of a smooth trajectory through animal space, a trajectory in which every intermediate stage assisted survival and reproduction.

  Richard Dawkins

  Science, Animal, Space

  Richard Dawkins (2015). “The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design”, p.96, W. W. Norton & Company

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• For my own part I would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded enemy in order to save the life of his keeper; or from that old baboon, who, descending from the mountains, carried away in triumph his young comrade from a crowd of astonished dogs-as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practices infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions.

  Charles Darwin

  Dog, Sacrifice, Order

  The Descent of Man ch. 21 (1871)

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• For three million years we were hunter-gatherers, and it was through the evolutionary pressures of that way of life that a brain so adaptable and so creative eventually emerged. Today we stand with the brains of hunter-gatherers in our heads, looking out on a modern world made comfortable for some by the fruits of human inventiveness, and made miserable for others by the scandal of deprivation in the midst of plenty.

  Richard Leakey

  Creativity, Science, Years

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• Forty thousand years of evolution and we've barely even tapped the vastness of human potential.

  David Koepp

  Science, Years, Vastness

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• Genius and science have burst the limits of space, and few observations, explained by just reasoning, have unveiled the mechanism of the universe. Would it not also be glorious for man to burst the limits of time, and, by a few observations, to ascertain the history of this world, and the series of events which preceded the birth of the human race?

  Georges Cuvier

  Science, Men, Space

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• History employs evolution to structure biological events in time.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Time, Science, History

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History”, p.18, W. W. Norton & Company

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• I like people. I like animals, too-whales and quail, dinosaurs and dodos. But I like human beings especially, and I am unhappy that the pool of human germ plasm, which determines the nature of the human race, is deteriorating.

  Linus Pauling

  Science, Animal, Whales

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• I understood that you would take the Human Race in the concrete, have exploded the absurd notion of Pope's Essay on Man, [Erasmus] Darwin, and all the countless Believers-even (strange to say) among Xtians-of Man's having progressed from an Ouran Outang state-so contrary to all History, to all Religion, nay, to all Possibility-to have affirmed a Fall in some sense.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Fall, Science, Men

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, J. R. De J. Jackson (2000). “Lectures 1818-1819 on the history of philosophy”, Bollingen Foundation

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• If a single cell, under appropriate conditions, becomes a man in the space of a few years, there can surely be no difficulty in understanding how, under appropriate conditions, a cell may, in the course of untold millions of years, give origin to the human race.

  Herbert Spencer

  Science, Men, Cells

  Herbert Spencer (1864). “The Principles of Biology”, p.350

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