Evolution Quotes - Page 10

Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution? I suspect that it does; I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick extinction. Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and without courage all other virtues are useless. Therefore the frogs, the toads, keep on singing even though we know, if they don't, that the sound of their uproar must surely be luring all the snakes and ringtail cats and kit foxes and coyotes and great horned owls toward the scene of their happiness.

Edward Abbey

When you're young, all evolution lies before you, every road is open to you, and at the same time you can enjoy the fact of being there on the rock, flat mollusk-pulp, damp and happy.

Italo Calvino

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

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

Robert A. Heinlein

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

Human beings are so destructive. I sometimes think we're a kind of plague, that will scrub the earth clean. We destroy things so well that I sometimes think, maybe that's our function. Maybe every few eons, some animal comes along that kills off the rest of the world, clears the decks, and lets evolution proceed to its next phase.

Michael Crichton

If evolution really works, how come mothers only have two hands?

Milton Berle

Evolution could so easily be disproved if just a single fossil turned up in the wrong date order. Evolution has passed this test with flying colours.

Richard Dawkins

Perhaps our greatest distinction as a species is our capacity, unique among animals, to make counter-evolutionary choices.

Jared Diamond

If only we could have talked to you, the hive-queen said in Ender's words. But since it could not be, we ask only this: that you remember us, not as enemies, but as a tragic sisters, changed into foul shape by fate or God or evolution. If we had kissed, it would have been the miracle to make us human in each other's eyes. Instead we killed each other. But still we welcome you now as guestfriends. Come into our home, daughters of Earth; dwell in our tunnels, harvest our fields; what we cannot do, you are now our hands to do for us. Blossom, trees; ripen, fields; be warm for them, suns; be fertile for them, planets: they are our adopted daughters, and they have come home.

Orson Scott Card

Humans have evolved to their relatively high state by retaining the immature characteristics of their ancestors. Humans are the most advanced of mammals – although a case could be made for the dolphins – because they seldom grow up. Behavioral traits such as curiosity about the world, flexibility of response, and playfulness are common to practically all young mammals but are usually rapidly lost with the onset of maturity in all but humans. Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.

Tom Robbins

It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that).

Richard Dawkins

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

Richard Dawkins

Today we are fighting Communism. Okay. If I'd been alive fifty years ago, the brand of Conservatism we have today would have been damn near called Communism and we should have been told to go and fight that. History is moving pretty quickly these days and the heroes and villains keep on changing parts.

Ian Fleming

Most species do their own evolving, making it up as they go along, which is the way Nature intended. And this is all very natural and organic and in tune with mysterious cycles of the cosmos, which believes that there's nothing like millions of years of really frustrating trial and error to give a species moral fiber and, in some cases, backbone.

Terry Pratchett

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

Pope Benedict XVI

Nevertheless, it is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.

H.L. Mencken

It wasn't torpor that kept her - she was often restless to the point of irritability. She simply liked to feel that she was prevented from leaving, that she was needed.

Ian McEwan

The material you work with is that which you will come to resemble. That which you work against will always work against you, including yourself.

Henry Rollins

Accepting evolution does not force us to jettison our morals and ethics, and rejecting evolution does not ensure their constancy.

Michael Shermer

Now times had changed, and the inherited wisdom of the past had become folly.

Arthur C. Clarke

For our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behavior. We innovate new behavior to adapt.

Michael Crichton

Origin of man now proved.—Metaphysics must flourish.—He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.

Charles Darwin

Evolutionarily speaking, there is seldom any mystery in why we seek the goals we seek — why, for example, people would rather make love with an attractive partner than get a slap on the belly with a wet fish.

Steven Pinker

The franchise and the virus work on the same principle, what thrives in one place will thrive in another. You just have to find a sufficiently virulent business plan, condense it into a three-ring binder ― its DNA ― Xerox it, and embed it in the fertile line of a well-traveled highway, preferably one with a left turn lane. Then the growth will expand until it runs up against its property lines.

Neal Stephenson

It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change.

Leon C. Megginson

At bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time.

Friedrich Nietzsche

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

Richard Dawkins

Sometimes painfully lost people can teach us lessons that we didn't think we needed to know, or be reminded of---the more history changes, the more it stays the same.

Shannon L. Alder

Every song has a composer, every book has an author, every car has a maker, every painting has a painter, and every building has a builder. So it isn't irrational to take this simple logic a little further and say that nature must have had a Maker. It would be irrational to believe that it made itself.

Ray Comfort

Not only had I got rid of the theology and the supernatural, but I had found the truth of evolution.

Andrew Carnegie

I simply would not accede to being forced into this, and would frequently be kept out of classes because of irreverent comments and mocking this religious stuff. Frankly, it stayed with me to this day. In fact, don't get me going. I'm almost as bad as Richard Dawkins on this issue.

Richard E. Leakey

Who gave the decisive deathblow to the argument from design on the basis of biological complexity? Both philosophers and biologists are divided on this point (Oppy 1996; Dawkins 1986; Sober 2008). Some have claimed that the biological design argument did not falter until Darwin provided a proper naturalistic explanation for adaptive complexity; others maintain that David Hume had already shattered the argument to pieces by sheer logical force several decades earlier, in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (Hume 2007 [1779]). Elliott Sober has been among the philosophers who maintain that, as Hume was not in a position to offer a serious alternative explanation of adaptive complexity, it is hardly surprising that 'intelligent people strongly favored the design hypothesis' (Sober 2000, 36). In his most recent book, however, Sober (2008) carefully develops what he thinks is the most charitable reconstruction of the design argument, and proceeds to show why it is defective for intrinsic reasons (for earlier version of this argument, see Sober 1999, 2002). Sober argues that the design argument can be rejected even without the need to consider alternative explanations for adaptive complexity (Sober 2008, 126): 'To see why the design argument is defective, there is no need to have a view as to whether Darwin’s theory of evolution is true' (Sober 2008, 154).

Maarten Boudry

God did not create evolution--evolution created God. The evolution of religion is as follows: animism--polytheism--monotheism--agnosticism--atheism. As history progresses, people worship fewer and fewer gods, and the one God becomes the incredible shrinking god. He shrinks and shrinks until he becomes insignificant. More and more theists go about their business as if God isn't there. Some even become agnostics or atheists.

G.M. Jackson

My practice as a scientist is atheistic. That is to say, when I set up an experiment I assume that no god, angel or devil is going to interfere with its course; and this assumption has been justified by such success as I have achieved in my professional career. I should therefore be intellectually dishonest if I were not also atheistic in the affairs of the world.

J.B.S. Haldane

Maybe scientists are fundamentalist when it comes to defining in some abstract way what is meant by 'truth'. But so is everybody else. I am no more fundamentalist when I say evolution is true than when I say it is true that New Zealand is in the southern hemisphere. We believe in evolution because the evidence supports it, and we would abandon it overnight if new evidence arose to disprove it.

Richard Dawkins

There was something built into the human brain by natural selection which was once useful, and which now manifests itself as religion.

Richard Dawkins

The surname of an atheist is compound unfortunate plus being, therefore unfortunate-beings, making all atheists unfortunate beings because human beings are created by God and not products of big bang atoms undergoing evolution.

S. E. Entsua-Mensah

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

Richard Dawkins

The path of life on our planet and maybe many others does not need a divinity to thrive, it needs no excuse to live, owes no debt to the universe because it is a part of the universe, no driving force other than the primal forces of physics and chemistry are needed, those two sets created biology, and if you backtrack all of the life on the Earth, you inevitably end up looking at stardust.

Steve Merrick

All life, all intelligence, all creativity and all 'design' anywhere in the universe, is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection. It follows that design comes late in the universe, after a period of Darwinian evolution. Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.

Richard Dawkins

Past and present religious atrocities have occured not because we are evil, but because it is a fact of nature that the human species is, biologically, only partly rational. Evolution has meant that our prefrontal lobes are too small, our adrenal glands are too big, and our reproductive organs apparently designed by committee; a recipe which, alone or in combination, is very certain to lead to some unhappiness and disorder.

Christopher Hitchens

Feeling had controlling influence over those primitive people, not thinking. It played a crucial part in the evolutionary development of modern humans. That’s why we humans are basically an emotional species alongside being the smartest one.

Abhijit Naskar

I sometimes try to imagine what would have happened if we'd known the bonobo first and the chimpanzee only later or not at all. The discussion about human evolution might not revolve as much around violence, warfare, and male dominance, but rather around sexuality, empathy, caring, and co-operation. What a different intellectual landscape we would occupy!”,Our Inner Ape

Frans de Waal

The book of nature is like the Bible: Everyone reads into it what they want, from tolerance to intolerance, and from altruism to greed. It’s good to realize, though, that if biologists never stop talking of competition, this doesn’t mean they advocate it, and if they call genes selfish, this doesn’t mean that genes actually are. Genes can’t be any more “selfish” than a river can be “angry,” or sun rays “loving.” Genes are little chunks of DNA. At most, they are “self-promoting,” because successful genes help their carriers spread more copies of themselves.

Frans de Waal

Perhaps the most striking aspect of this entire subject is that there are nonhuman primates so close to the edge of language, so willing to learn, so entirely competent in its use and inventive in its application once the language is taught. But this raises a curious question: Why are they all on the edge? Why are there no nonhuman primates with an existing complex gestural language? One possible answer, it seems to me, is that humans have systematically exterminated those other primates who displayed signs of intelligence.

Carl Sagan

No human, no matter how ancient, or how popular, can be above the laws of Nature.

Abhijit Naskar

Perhaps he knew, there in the grass by the waters, that he had before him an immense journey.

Loren Eiseley

We've got this weird dysgenic situation where we're basically just paying idiots to breed and taxing intelligent people to stay away from each other with anything remotely resembling fertility.

Stefan Molyneux

It may sound peculiar coming from an old punk rocker, but I strongly believe that governmental policies are the only viable way to administer our long-term success as a species. I guess you could say that my attitude of 'fuck the government' is still intact. But it's more a criticism of lousy government than a statement of nihilism. The truth is, when it comes to environmental protection, the government is the best way to enact a new social awareness by establishing laws by which industries have to abide.

Greg Graffin

I am perhaps more proud of having helped to redeem the character of the cave-man than of any other single achievement of mine in the field of anthropology.

Henry Fairfield Osborn

Sentiments that glorify humanity know no racial distinction.

Abhijit Naskar

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Evolution Quotes - Page 10

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