Evolution Quotes

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The meaning of evolution is probably more misunderstood than any doctrine of science. The reason is that it has been discussed very freely by those who are not informed, and in this way much misinformation has been propagated.

John Merle Coulter

Today we are living in an intellectual and technological paradise and a moral and social nightmare because the intellectual level of evolution, in its struggle to become free of the social level, has ignored the social level's role in keeping the biological level under control.

Robert M. Pirsig

As an academic scientist I am a passionate Darwinian, believing that natural selection is, if not the only driving force in evolution, certainly the only known force capable of producing the illusion of purpose which so strikes all who contemplate nature.

Richard Dawkins

Blake expressed some doubt as to whether God had made the tiger. But the tiger is in many ways an admirable animal. We have now to ask if God made the tapeworm. And it is questionable whether an affirmative answer fits in either with what we know about the process of evolution or what many of us believe about the moral perfection of God.

J. B. S. Haldane

Sediments between 4 and 10 million years in age are potential guardians of the Holy Grail of human evolution — the period when our lineage began its separate end run to later domination, and a time for which no fossil evidence exists at all.

Stephen Jay Gould

A crystal and a cell, A jelly fish and a saurian And caves where cavemen dwell. Then a sense of law and beauty, And a face turned from the clod. Some call it evolution And others call it God.

Robert Andrews Millikan

Agricultural practice served Darwin as the material basis for the elaboration of his theory of Evolution, which explained the natural causation of the adaptation we see in the structure of the organic world. That was a great advance in the knowledge of living nature.

It is your soul's journey to enroll the ego in the quest for the ultimate victory - the evolution of your own individual consciousness.

As a natural process, of the same character as the development of a tree from its seed, or of a fowl from its egg, evolution excludes creation and all other kinds of supernatural intervention.

Thomas Henry Huxley

If God is a synonym for the deepest principles of physics, what word is left for a hypothetical being who answers prayers, intervenes to save cancer patients or helps evolution over difficult jumps, forgives sins or dies for them? Snake Oil and Holy Water

Richard Dawkins

Put bluntly yet magnanimously, the scenario of cosmic evolution grants us unparalled "big thinking," from which may well emerge the global ethics and planetary citizenship likely needed if our species is to remain part of that same cosmic evolutionary scenario.

Though we must hold to our faith in the evolution of species, there is little evidence as to how it has come about, and no clear proof that the process is continuing in any considerable degree at the present time.

William Bateson

When we try to understand how contemporary Indian food came into being, it is similar to learning about the evolution of language. We place the data available to us in a multidimensional space and study similarities and dissimilarities with other global cuisines.

Years ago, scientists were predicting the evolution of a race of men without legs, thanks to the automobile. Nowadays we know they were wrong. It is not our legs we are losing. It is our minds.

If the work you do is not related to the absolute necessity of evolution, it is useless and harmful.

Constantin Brâncuși

The evolution of technology is often based on assumed, rather than real, criteria.

There has never been a quiescent point in the evolution of the automobile. We face many problems today, and once we've solved those, we'll face many new ones. We will keep on striving for perfection. Motorsports has always been able to make important contributions to solving these problems, and will continue to do so in the future.

Ferdinand Anton Ernst Porsche

I am afraid the knockabout comedy of modern atomic physics is not very tender towards our aesthetic ideals. The stately drama of stellar evolution turns out to be more like the hair-breadth escapades in the films. The music of the spheres has a painful suggestion of — jazz.

Arthur Eddington

Evolution has no purpose; man must supply this for himself.

George Gaylord Simpson

Anything that is produced by evolution is bound to be a bit of a mess.

With the advent of genetic engineering the time required for the evolution of new species may literally collapse.

We know evolution happened because innumerable bits of data from myriad fields of science conjoin to paint a rich portrait of life's pilgrimage.

Michael Shermer

Those persons who are burning to display heroism may rest assured that the course of social evolution will offer them every opportunity.

Evolution itself is accepted by zoologists not because it has been observed to occur or is supported by logically coherent arguments, but because it does fit all the facts of taxonomy, of palaeontology, and of geographical distribution, and because no alternative explanation is credible.

James Dewey Watson

There are three great problems of our time.... One of these is that doctrine concerning the constitution of matter which, for want of a better name, I'll call "molecular"; the second is the doctrine of the conservation of energy; the third is the doctrine of evolution.

Thomas Henry Huxley