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Evolution Quotes
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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
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Human nature, as manifested in tribalism and nationalism, provides the momentum of the machinery of human evolution.
Arthur Keith
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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
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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
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[Darwin's notebooks] include many statements showing that he espoused but feared to expose something he perceived as far more heretical than evolution itself: philosophical materialism — the postulate that matter is the stuff of all existence and that all mental and spiritual phenomena are its by-products.
Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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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.
Rudolf Steiner
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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
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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
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Evolution as such is no longer a theory for a modern author. It is as much a fact as that the earth revolves around the sun.
Ernst Mayr
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Organisms automatically generate their own cycles of abundance and rarity and... the changes in selection pressures with which these are associated may greatly increase the speed of evolution.
E. B. Ford
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I venture another, and perhaps equally reckless generalization — nothing makes sense in biology except in the light of evolution, sub specie evolutionism. If the living world has not arisen from common ancestors by means of an evolutionary process, then the fundamental unity of living things is a hoax and their diversity, a joke.
Theodosius Dobzhansky
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The human mind, dwelling on such considerations as these [evolution of the world], seems at times to have been affected by a sur-excitation of the imagination, and a consequent paralysis of the understanding, which led to a refusal to measure geological time by years at all, or to reckon by anything less than "eternities."
William Johnson Sollas
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Yoga is not a new path to follow but a way to become conscious of the original impetus of life. Yoga is the movement and evolution of Life itself.
David Frawley
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Evolution has always proved itself to be enormously more intelligent than the best evolutionists.
Primo Levi
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It was none the less a perfectly ordinary horse, such as convergent evolution has produced in many of the places that life is to be found. They have always understood a great deal more than they let on. It is difficult to be sat on all day, every day, by some other creature, without forming an opinion about them.
Douglas Adams
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The German Fuhrer, as I have consistently maintained, is an evolutionist; he has consciously sought to make the practice of Germany conform to the theory of evolution.
Arthur Keith
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From our point of view, therefore, the modern process of evolution of living organisms is fundamentally nothing more than the addition of some new links to an endless chain of transformations of matter, a chain the beginning of which extends to the very dawn of existence of our planet.
Alexander Oparin
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It is the great irony of modern evolutionary genetics that the spirit of explanation has moved more and more towards optimal adaptation, while the technical developments of population genetics of the past 30 years have been increasingly to show the efficacy of non adaptive forces in evolution.
Richard Lewontin
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According to quantum doctrine, the roots of life and mind lie embedded deep down in the ultimate structure of this universe, and they are not mere singular apparitions of an unaccountable character, arising accidentally in the later phases of evolution.
Jan Smuts
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I have shown that those who deplore Artificial Intelligence are also those who deplore the evolutionary accounts of human mentality: if human minds are non-miraculous products of evolution, then they are, in the requisite sense, artifacts, and all their powers must have an ultimately mechanical explanation. We are descended from macros and made of macros, and nothing we can do is beyond the power of huge assemblies of macros.
Daniel Dennett
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What I call middle-class society is any society that becomes rigidified in predetermined forms, forbidding all evolution, all gains, all progress, all discovery. I call middle-class a closed society in which life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas and men are corrupt. And I think that a man who takes a stand against this death is in a sense a revolutionary.
Frantz Fanon
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The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils... Evolution's Erratic Pace
Stephen Jay Gould
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I think it is now time for social scientists to step out of the shadow and to establish an advanced social sciences methodology that integrates science (third-person view) social transformation (second-person view) and the evolution of self (first-person view) into a coherent framework of consciousness-based action research
Otto Scharmer
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Creationist critics often charge that evolution cannot be tested, and therefore cannot be viewed as a properly scientific subject at all. This claim is rhetorical nonsense.
Stephen Jay Gould
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Destiny is the invention of the cowardly, and the resigned.
Ignazio Silone
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