Evolution Quotes

Evolutionary biology is imperialistic, overtaking entire fields of endeavor simply by attaching the prefix bio – or neuro -- to their names: bioethics, no comics, even, God help us, neurotheology. Its logic is deployed against helpless laymen as a bully's truncheon or an argument stopper.

~ Andrew Ferguson

Trying to force something is the best way to stop it from happening.

~ Idries Shah

Women, churchgoers, and conservative were more likely than men, nonchurch goers, and liberals to disagree with the reductionist (neural) account of human life.

~ Andrew Ferguson

It is high time that we grew up and left the Garden. We are indeed Eden’s children, yet it is time to place Genesis alongside the geocentric myth in the basket of stories that once, in a world of intellectual naivete, made helpful sense. As we walk through the gates, aware of the dazzling richness of the genuine biological world, there might even be a smile on the Creator’s face — that at long last His creatures have learned enough to understand His world as it truly is.

~ Kenneth R. Miller

Extremely unlikely events occur every moment and it is not a priori unthinkable that the evolution of life should be due to mere chance than that a particular order in a pack of cards should result from mechanical shuffling.

~ Leszek Kołakowski

If you assume that it is there, you will generally not be far off the truth…

~ Idries Shah

Gordon Van Wylen, Chairman of the Dept. of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan commented that, “The question that arises is how the universe got into the state of reduced entropy in the first place, since all natural processes known to us tend to increase entropy?” (Gordon Van Wylen and Richard Edwin Sonntag, Fundamentals of Classical Thermodynamics, 1973). He concludes by saying, “The author has found that the second law [of thermodynamics] tends to increase conviction that there is a Creator.

~ Gordon J. Van Wylen

Charles Darwin's only mistake was in not being a physicist, because the entire process of evolution started before our planet formed, with the event called the big bang, at this point our knowledge is such that I can hazard this further observation, all of the building blocks of life started at that moment, and that is how far we can back track this process of evolution.

~ Steve Merrick

Dan Nilsson even remarks of compound eyes that ‘It is only a small exaggeration to say that evolution seems to be fighting a desperate battle to improve a basically disastrous design.

~ Richard Dawkins

Ever since about 3.8 billion years ago, when the first cells began quivering in the primordial ooze, Evolution has produced a nonstop parade of inflatable noses, bizarre genitalia, awkward feeding habits, aggressively antisocial tendencies, and mucus. So much mucus.

~ Mara Grunbaum

That's not me, Honey. That's evolution!

~ A. Cretan

The mechanism of natural selection depends on the survival, not of the strongest, nor the most intelligent, but of the most adaptable.

~ Julian Barnes

The Path is not to be found anywhere except in human service

~ Idries Shah

it was being written in the East that 'Sufism was formerly a reality without a name: now it is a name without a reality'.

~ Idries Shah

Corvina must have been so different then ... really literally a different person. At what point do you make that call? At what point should you just give someone a new name? Sorry, no, you don't get to be Corvina anymore. Now you're Corvina 2.0 - a dubious upgrade.

~ Robin Sloan

But the Sufis work IN the world, and therefore WITH 'things of the world'.

~ Idries Shah

The fact that mammalian crying serves as a cue for maternal support, rather than as a dinner bell, is a major evolutionary difference.

~ Matthew D. Lieberman

...I suspect everyone there can reason along the lines I described...It's just that when it comes to evolution, and especially to the related realization that we are all pretty small bits of the universe, it seems as though Ham and his followers just can't handle the truth. They throw aside their common sense and cling to the hope that there's something that makes it okay to *not* think for themselves.The irony is, in the process they are walking away from our ability to understand who we are, where we came from, and how we fit into a cosmos...If there is something divine in our nature, something that sets humans apart from all creatures, surely our ability to reason is a key part of it. The irony is, in the process they are walking away from our ability to understand who we are, where we came from, and how we fit into a cosmos...If there is something divine in our nature, something that sets humans apart from all creatures, surely our ability to reason is a key part of it.

~ Bill Nye

...causing her eyes to bulge and her tongue to flick from behind her luscious lips, scaring away insects. — Amok 2015

~ Fred Barnett

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.

~ Charles Darwin

After we’re feasted down to white sticks and it’s all covered in lions and trees and whatever the monkeys become prod the ground with a toe, staring down with glittering eyes at the guts of a wristwatch. After the bonfires and sun worship and they grow brains and can x-ray the ground. They can figure all this out, file it away. List my name with an asterisk after it, a footnote at the bottom phrasing my presence here in short, dull terminology.

~ Eric Sennevoight

In The Newly Evolving World, Everyone Is Part Of The Collective.

~ Elaine Seiler

However life started, once established, it persisted for over 3.5 billion years and evolved from microbial slime to the sophistication of human civilization.

~ David C. Catling

It's Survival of Them Who's Best at Nicking Things, girl!

~ Catherynne M. Valente

Sufis are not here to satisfy a demand. They exist to share what they have got. These two things are not always the same.

~ Idries Shah

The principle chore of brains is to get the body parts where they should be in order that the organism may survive. Improvements in sensorimotor control confer an evolutionary advantage: a fancier style of representing [the world] is advantageous so long as it... enhances an organism's chances for survival. Truth, whatever that is, takes the hindmost.

~ Patricia Churchland

Far from being the smartest possible biological species, we are probably better thought of as the stupidest possible biological species capable of starting a technological civilization - a niche we filled because we got there first, not because we are in any sense optimally adapted to it.

~ Nick Bostrom

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved.

~ Charles Darwin

The slower frequencies are dropping away to be replaced by the faster, higher, more refined frequencies that are part of the Energetic Evolution.

~ Elaine Seiler

Breaking up is a natural evolution when you try to figure out what you want in life. If you’re with an individual who isn’t moving in the same direction and at the same rate that you are, it ain’t going to work.

~ Usher Raymond

You can perceive a person's aspiration if it is genuine, because this creates a change in the emanations from such a person.

~ Idries Shah

The automatism of man is overcome, in the words of Dhun'Nun, by aiming for 'being as you were, where you were, before you were'.

~ Idries Shah

Long ago the signalling had become no more than a meaningless ritual, now maintained by an animal which had forgotten to learn and a robot which had never known to forget.

~ Arthur C. Clarke

With all respect to your religion or world-view — thank God, thank the universe, thank evolutionary processes — the keyword is thank — just have some gratitude and be thankful.

~ Bryant Mcgill

Thinking your way through life’s challenges with the limited perspective of your five senses, will no longer work! YOU must expand your reality to include the unseen ‘other’ realms.

~ Elaine Seiler

Traditional guidelines for manifestation in the three-dimensional world are not enough to ensure manifestation once one has begun the process of energetic evolution.

~ Elaine Seiler

If animal history has been a history of evolution, then the history of mankind is one of retrogression. Hooray for monsters! Monsters are the great embodiments of the weak.

~ Kōbō Abe

When will you ever accept the true ugliness of health?

~ Kōbō Abe

Constantinople had been changing for sometime before the Young Turks got hold of it. It would continue to change long after they had gone.

~ Charles Emmerson

Lemons. He liked lemons. They made you make funny faces when you bit them, and a very, very long way in the future there was a really amazing planet where they'd evolved into people and lived in harmony with a variety of hyper-intelligent bee. Evolution. Thousands and thousands of years of tiny changes could turn little burning sparks of chemistry into people, into monsters and angels and even human beings.

~ Nick Harkaway