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Evolution Quotes
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The main object of astronomy, as of all science, is not the collection of facts, but the development, on the basis of collected facts, of satisfactory theories regarding the nature, mutual relations, and probable history and evolution of the objects of study.
Henry Norris Russell
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Sex was invented as a biological instrument by (say) the green algae. But as an instrument in the ascent of man which is basic to his cultural evolution, it was invented by man himself.
Jacob Bronowski
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Another possibility is that evolution selected creativity in general as a marker of sexual fitness.
Daniel Levitin
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Chemical engineering more than any other, may be called the engineering of the future. It is the result of an evolution in which most of the other branches have played a part... The chemical engineer stands today on the threshold of a vast virgin realm; in it lie the secrets of life and prosperity for mankind in the future of the world.
John Hays Hammond
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Some people maintain that scientific insight has eliminated the need for meaning. I do not agree. The scientific worldview established the notion that there is a sense and purpose in the development of the universe when it recognized the evolution from the primal explosion to matter, life, and humanity. In humans, nature begins to recognize itself.
Victor Weisskopf
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Ahead of me lies the familiar litany: weakening of the heart, hardening of the arteries, increasing brittleness of bones, decreases in kidney filtration rates, lower resistance of the immune system, and loss of memory. The list could be extended almost indefinitely. Evolution seems indeed to have arranged things so that all our systems deteriorate, and that we invest in repair only as much as we are worth.
Jared Diamond
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Leishmaniasis, schistosomiasis, malignant tertian malaria, filariasis, echinococcosis, onchocerciasis, yellow fever, amoebic dysentery, bleeding bot-fly cysts... evolution has devised a hundred ways to macerate livers and turn blood into a parasite's broth.
E. O. Wilson
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Since all discovery emerges from an interaction of mind and nature, thoughtful scientists must scrutinize the main biases that record our socialization, our moment in political and geographical history, even the limitations (if we hope to comprehend them from within) imposed by a mental machinery jury-rigged in the immensity of evolution.
Stephen Jay Gould
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Life did not arise as an accidental, wildly improbable leap from molecule to cells or even to viruses, but through a step-by-step evolution, just as humans did not evolve in a single leap from one-celled creatures.
Eric Lerner
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I'll admit that the discovery of evolution is humbling, but it is also empowering. It transforms our relationship to the life around us. Instead of being outsiders watching the natural world go by, we are insiders. We are part of the process; we are the exquisite result of billions of years of natural research and development.
Bill Nye
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Man's evolution is far more extraordinary than the first chapter of Genesis used to lead people to suppose. Man's history, pre-history, ancient, medieval and modern, is by far the most wonderful thing in the Universe [about] which any news has come through to us.
G. M. Trevelyan
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The creed of eugenics is founded upon the idea of evolution...
Francis Galton
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Evolution has no moral direction. An evolutionary understanding of human nature can explain the differing intuitions we have when we are faced with an individual rather than with a mass of people, or with people close to us rather than with those far away, but it does not justify those feelings.
Peter Singer
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Spiritual evolution is part of every soul's destiny on Earth, and each soul grows and evolves at a different rate. You are right where you need to be.
James Van Praagh
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America is the ultimate denial of the theory of man's continuous evolution.
H. Rap Brown
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Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution — paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce.
Stephen Jay Gould
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Cultures are not the source of all morals, only a limited set of morals. Cultures can be graded and judged morally according to their contribution to the evolution of life.
Robert M. Pirsig
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Masonry is too great an institution to have been made in a day, much less by a few men, but was a slow evolution through long time, unfolding its beauty as it grew. Indeed, it was like one of its own cathedrals which one generation of builders wrought and vanished, and another followed, until, amidst vicissitudes of time and change, of decline and revival, the order itself became a temple of Freedom and Fraternity.
Joseph Fort Newton
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Evolution is a quirky take of old structures pressed and altered to new functions.
Stephen Jay Gould
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The great word Evolution had not yet, in 1860, made a new religion of history, but the old religion had preached the same doctrinefor a thousand years without finding in the entire history of Rome anything but flat contradiction.
Henry Adams
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For the scientific materialist the materialism comes first; the science comes thereafter. We might therefore more accurately term them "materialists employing science." And if materialism is true, then some materialistic theory of evolution has to be true simply as a matter of logical deduction, regardless of the evidence.
Philip Johnson
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I see nothing in the theory of evolution inconsistent with an Almighty Creator and Protector.
John Henry Newman
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Human beings are born and begin their evolution through the great spiral of consciousness, moving from archaic to magic to mythic to rational to perhaps integral, and from there perhaps into genuinely transpersonal domains. But for every person that moves into integral or higher, dozens are born into the archaic.
Ken Wilber
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The brain is the great factory of thought. To it are directed all the forces of nature, forces which, for thousands of years, have been expending themselves upon it and impressing on it a slow and continuous motion of evolution.
Leonardo Bianchi
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I am not, personally, a believer or a religious man in any sense of institutional commitment or practice. But I have a great respect for religion, and the subject has always fascinated me, beyond almost all others (with a few exceptions, like evolution and paleontology).
Stephen Jay Gould
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