Evolution Quotes

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We must bear in mind the fact that millions of years are spent in the fashioning of minutia of perfection in types which are certainly not near the highway of evolution that led to backboned animals and eventually to man. Nothing is too remote, too minute, too trivial — everything must be finished and refined.

John Arthur Thomson

There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.

James Dewey Watson

Our conception of the structure of the Universe bears all the marks of a transitory structure. Our theories are decidedly in a state of continuous and just now very rapid evolution.

Willem de Sitter

Yoga is an interior penetration leading to integration of being, senses, breath, mind, intelligence, consciousness, and Self. It is definitely an inward journey, evolution through involution, toward the Soul, which in turn desires to emerge and embrace you in its glory.

B. K. S. Iyengar

Places come to exist in our imaginations because of stories, and so do we. When we reach for a "sense of place," we posit an intimate relationship to a set of stories connected to a particular location, such as Hong Kong or the Grand Canyon or the bed where we were born, thinking of histories and the evolution of personalities in a local context. Having "a sense of self" means possessing a set of stories about who we are and with whom and why.

William Kittredge

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

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

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.

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

Change is always subjective. All through evolution you find that the conquest of nature comes by change in the subject. Apply this to religion and morality, and you will find that the conquest of evil comes by the change in the subjective alone. That is how the Advaitic system gets its whole force, on the subjective side of man.

Swami Vivekananda

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

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

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.

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

A high place of honor, although doubtless one to be obtained only after enduring the pangs of a prolonged crucifixion, awaits that philosophical biologist, or that philosopher sufficiently acquainted with scientific biology, who subjects the modern doctrine of evolution to a thoroughly critical analysis, with a view to detect and to estimate its metaphysical assumptions.

George Trumbull Ladd

It is a century now since Darwin gave us the first glimpse of the origin of species. We know now what was unknown to all the preceding caravan of generations: that men are only fellow-voyagers with other creatures in the odyssey of evolution. This new knowledge should have given us, by this time, a sense of kinship with fellow-creatures; a wish to live and let live; a sense of wonder over the magnitude and duration of the biotic enterprise.

Life... may be regarded either as a negligible accident in a bye-product of the cosmic process, or as the supreme manifestation of the high effort of creative evolution, for which the Earth alone, in the chances of time and space, has given a fitting home.

William Cecil Dampier

CANNOT BELIEVE BOTH GOSPEL AND EVOLUTION. I say most emphatically, you cannot believe in this theory of the origin of man, and at the same time accept the plan of salvation as set forth by the Lord our God. You must choose the one and reject the other, for they are in direct conflict and there is a gulf separating them which is so great that it cannot be bridged, no matter how much one may try to do so.

Joseph Fielding Smith