Evolution Quotes

If the second dinosaur to the left of the tall cycad tree had not happened to sneeze and thereby fail to catch the tiny, shrew-like ancestor of all the mammals, we should none of us be here.

~ Richard Dawkins

Disaster is a natural part of my evolution toward tragedy and dissolution.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

It is failure that guides evolution; perfection provides no incentive for improvement, and nothing is perfect.

~ Colson Whitehead

Things exist either because they have recently come into existence or because they have qualities that made them unlikely to be destroyed in the past.

~ Richard Dawkins

Now, science cannot completely exclude the possibility of supernatural explanation. It is possible - though very unlikely - that our whole world is controlled by elves.

~ Jerry A. Coyne

But complex animals had obtained their adaptive flexibility at some cost--they had traded one dependency for another. It was no longer necessary to change their bodies to adapt, because now their adaptation was behavior, socially determined. That behavior required learning. In a sense, among higher animals adaptive fitness was no longer transmitted to the next generation by DNA at all. It was now carried by teaching.

~ Michael Crichton

What's the matter? What's the antimatter? Does it antimatter?

~ Wes Scoop Nisker

In a perfectly designed world —one with no history— we would not have to suffer everything from hemorrhoids to cancer.

~ Neil Shubin

Obsolescence is a fate devoutly to be wished, lest science stagnate and die.

~ Stephen Jay Gould

I am an enthusiastic Darwinian, but I think Darwinism is too big a theory to be confined to the narrow context of the gene.

~ Richard Dawkins

But just in proportion as this process of extermination has acted on an enormous scale, so must the number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed, be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record.

~ Charles Darwin

It's striking that Native Americans evolved no devastating epidemic diseases to give to Europeans in return for the many devastating epidemic diseases that Indians received from the Old World.

~ Jared Diamond

I didn't know what kind of creature I was supposed to be until I woke on a hospital cot and was informed I had died. Nobody ever told me what I was. I figured I was broken. But it turns out that my scars were divine signs that I was granted a chance to begin again.

~ Hannah Ashworth

Life is never static. Despite catastrophic tragedies, life has persisted in evolving new varieties of unimaginable forms. I find comfort in the narrative of evolutionary history.

~ Greg Graffin

The conditions necessary for devastating epidemics or pandemics just didn't exist until the agricultural revolution. The claim that modern medicine and sanitation save us from infectious diseases that ravaged pre-agricultural people (something we hear often) is like arguing that seat belts and air bags protect us from car crashes that were fatal to our prehistoric ancestors.

~ Cacilda Jethá

I mean to say, we all sprang from humble origins. Goodness gracious, who would have thought that a species of monkey would take over the kingdom of the world. … I cannot help but feel that the monkey was not a good choice. Surely one of the cat family would have been much more satisfactory. They have a much less emotional approach to life. (The Shadmock)

~ R. Chetwynd-Hayes

I had written the sentence, 'You mustn't think that the evolution that gave rise to us was the only evolutionary possibility on this planet. . . . that cultural developments could be shaped through the mediation of another animal species. If the biological conditions were favorable, some civilization not inferior to our own could arise in the depths of the sea. . . . Would it do the same stupid things mankind has done? Would it invite the same historical calamities? What would we say if some animal other than man declared that its education and its numbers gave it the sole right to occupy the entire world and hold sway over all creation?

~ Karel Čapek

We are one of many appearances of the thing called Life; we are not its perfect image, for it has no perfect image except Life, and life is multitudinous and emergent in the stream of time.

~ Loren Eiseley

When we no longer look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship, as at something wholly beyond his comprehension; when we regard every production of nature as one which has had a history; when we contemplate every complex structure and instinct as the summing up of many contrivances, each useful to the possessor, nearly in the same way as when we look at any great mechanical invention as the summing up of the labour, the experience, the reason, and even the blunders of numerous workmen; when we thus view each organic being, how far more interesting, I speak from experience, will the study of natural history become!

~ Charles Darwin

The debate that has been conducted in terms of creation versus evolution has gotten caught up with all kinds of other debates, and this has provided a singularly unhelpful backdrop to the would-be serious discussion of other parts of the Bible.

~ N.t. Wright

It is certain that such a revolution in thought - that is, such an expansion of consciousness, such an evolution of intelligence - is not the result of a whim. It is in fact a question of a cosmic influence to which the earth, along with everything in it, is subjected. A phase in the gestation of the planetary particle of our solar system is completed. Gaston Bachelard observes, in this connection, what he calls “a mutation of Spirit.” A new period must begin, and this is heralded by seismic movement, climate changes, and finally, above all, by the spirit that animates man.

~ Schwaller De Lubicz

But it had been widely argued that advanced intelligence could never arise in the sea, there were not enough challenges in so benign and unvarying an environment.

~ Arthur C. Clarke

But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?[To William Graham 3 July 1881]

~ Charles Darwin

We were not designed rationally, but are products of a convoluted history.

~ Neil Shubin

Of all the problems which will have to be faced in the future, in my opinion, the most difficult will be those concerning the treatment of the inferior races of mankind.

~ Leonard Darwin

Alas, our technology has marched ahead of our spiritual and social evolution, making us, frankly, a dangerous people.

~ Steven M. Greer

It looks as if the offspring have eyes so that they can see well (bad, teleological, backward causation), but that's an illusion. The offspring have eyes because their parents' eyes did see well (good, ordinary, forward causation).

~ Steven Pinker

The many meanings of 'evolution' are frequently exploited by Darwinists to distract their critics. Eugenie Scott recommends: 'Define evolution as an issue of the history of the planet: as the way we try to understand change through time. The present is different from the past. Evolution happened, there is no debate within science as to whether it happened, and so on... I have used this approach at the college level.' Of course, no college student—indeed, no grade-school dropout— doubts that 'the present is different from the past.' Once Scott gets them nodding in agreement, she gradually introduces them to 'The Big Idea' that all species—including monkeys and humans—are related through descent from a common ancestor... This tactic is called 'equivocation'—changing the meaning of a term in the middle of an argument.

~ Jonathan Wells

A four-letter alphabet called DNA.

~ Matt Ridley

You want proof evolution is for real, don’t waste your time with fossils; just check out the New York City rat. They started out as immigrants, stowaways in some ship’s cargo hold. Only the survivors got to breed, and they’ve been improving with every new litter. Smarter, faster, stronger. Getting ready to rule. Manhattan wouldn’t be the first island they took over.

~ Andrew Vachss

Koch's youthful idealism about libertarianism had largely devolved into a rationale for corporate self-interest.

~ John Charles Chasteen

As I said earlier it is most surprising that the kingdom of then world should have come under the sway of a species of monkey, and there is reason to suppose that there were other claimants to the throne. (The Shadmock)

~ R. Chetwynd-Hayes

As natural selection acts by competition, it adapts the inhabitants of each country only in relation to the degree of perfection of their associates; so that we need feel no surprise at the inhabitants of any one country, although on the ordinary view supposed to have been specially created and adapted for that country, being beaten and supplanted by the naturalised productions from another land.

~ Charles Darwin

Perhaps the most legitimately dispiriting thing about reciprocal altruism is that it is a misnomer. Whereas with kin selection the goal of our genes is to actually help another organism, with reciprocal altruism the goal is that the organism be left under the impression that we've helped; the impression alone is enough to bring the reciprocation.

~ Robert Wright

Inside our skulls are fish, reptile and shrew brains, as well as the highest centers that allow us to integrate information in our unique way; and some of our newer brain components talk to each other via some very ancient structures indeed. Our brains are makeshift structures, opportunistically assembled by Nature over hundreds of millions of years, and in multiple different ecological contexts.

~ Ian Tattersall

Love, I have always known, is an evolutionary trait. It is a delicately tuned, intricate, sensitive impulse, but a trait nevertheless, a reaction honed by millions of years of an ever-changing and complex mating instinct.

~ David Bajo

Probably went swimming and got eaten by a pineapple.

~ Terry Pratchett

...evolution propels itself by an inclination toward its next probable achievement. (Desire)

~ William S. Wilson

In evolutionary terms, that means we asked for it.

~ Sharon Moalem

Nobody can imagine how nothing could turn into something. Nobody can get an inch nearer to it by explaining how something could turn into something else. It is really far more logical to start by saying ‘In the beginning God created heaven and earth’ even ifyou only mean ‘In the beginning some unthinkable power began some unthinkable process.’ For God is by its nature aname of mystery, and nobody ever supposed that man could imagine how a world was created any more than he couldcreate one. But evolution really is mistaken for explanation. It has the fatal quality of leaving on many minds the impression that they do understand it and everything else

~ G.k. Chesterton