Evolution Quotes

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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.

The creed of eugenics is founded upon the idea of evolution...

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Human nature, as manifested in tribalism and nationalism, provides the momentum of the machinery of human evolution.

The creation... is not an event which happened in the remote past but is rather a living reality of the present. Creation is a process of evolution of which man is not merely a witness but a participant and a partner as well.

Theodosius Dobzhansky

Evolution is a change from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity, to a definite, coherent heterogeneity; through continuous differentiations and integrations.

Herbert Spencer

In the great sciences, like astronomy and geology, one gets wholes; the imagination has play-room. The cosmic laws launch him upon a shoreless sea. One is blown upon by a breeze from eternity. The same with biology in the light of evolution.

I can have little patience with those who oppose... the theory of evolution or what are called "mechanistic" explanations of the phenomena of life because of certain moral consequences which at first seem to follow from these theories, and still less with those who regard it as irrelevant or impious to ask certain questions at all. By refusing to face the facts, the conservative only weakens his own position.

Friedrich Hayek

For the whole consequence of evolution from blind impulse through conscious will to self conscious knowledge, seems still somehow to correspond to a continued result of births, rebirths and new births, which reach from the birth of the child from the mother, beyond the birth of the individual from the mass, to the birth of the creative work from the individual and finally to the birth of knowledge from the work.

Mr. Darwin... has failed to hold definitely before his mind the principle that the difference of sex, whatever it may consist in, must itself be subject to natural selection and to evolution.

Antoinette Brown Blackwell

Evolution of consciousness is the central motive of terrestrial existence.

The typical animal egg, once fertilized, develops as a unit; the secret fetus slips out of one stage of development into another, each stage geologic eons from the other, as it recapitulates animal evolution.

Donald Culross Peattie

Modem research lends not the smallest encouragement or sanction to the view that gradual evolution occurs by the transformation of masses of individuals, though that fancy has fixed itself on popular imagination.

William Bateson

If a man is able to submit himself to nature, then nature will react to his needs. Almighty nature is all powerful and all loving, for the laws of nature are for the creation and evolution of all beings and creatures throughout the cosmos. There is no greater kindness than the kindness of nature.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

If the positive innovations connect exponentially before the massive breakdowns reinforce one another, the system can re-pattern itself to a higher order of consciousness and freedom without the predicted economic, environmental, and social collapse...If the system could go either way, a slight intervention to assist the convergence of the positive can tip the scales of evolution in favor of the enhancement of life on Earth.

Barbara Marx Hubbard

If we can simply distinguish between the different successive stages of evolution, it is possible to see primeval events within the earthly events of the present.

What disconcerts the modern world at its very roots is not being sure, and not seeing how it ever could be sure, that there is an outcome-a suitable outcome to evolution. Half our present uneasiness would be turned to happiness if we could once make up our minds to accept the facts and place the essence and the measure of our modern cosmogonies within a noogenesis.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

More and more, physicists dare to say that all nature is in some sense life-like, that there is no absolutely new principle of life that comes in at some point in cosmic evolution.

Charles Hartshorne