Evolution Quotes

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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

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

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

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

[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

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 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.

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 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

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

Man's evolution from the brute Affords him, with so many gains, Life, liberty and the pursuit Of peak-time buses, trams and trains.

Frederick Macartney

The more you love your art/ calling/ enterprise, the more important its accomplishment to the evolution of your soul, the more you will fear it and the more Resistance you will experience facing it.

Steven Pressfield

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

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.

Evolution has always proved itself to be enormously more intelligent than the best evolutionists.

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.

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.

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

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.

The Evolution-idea is a master-key that opens many doors. It is a luminous interpretation of the world, throwing the light of the past upon the present.

John Arthur Thomson

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

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