Evolution Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Rule of thumb: The more important a call or action is to our soul's evolution, the Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it.

Steven Pressfield

To make a harsh but not entirely unjustified analogy, a government wedded to the ideology of competitiveness is as unlikely to make good economic policy as a government committed to creationism is to make good science policy, even in areas that have no direct relationship to the theory of evolution.

Fear, in evolution, has a special prominence: perhaps more than any other emotion it is crucial for survival.

It is as if evolution has built a safety device in our nervous system that allows us to experience full happiness only when we are living at 100%-when we are fully using the physical and mental equipment we have been given.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

The most worrisome development in the evolution of Al Qaeda's influence since 9/11 is the growth of pockets of Islamist radicalism in Western populations.

Lawrence Wright

In the end, theistic evolution is not a useful compromise between science and religion. Insofar as it makes testable predictions, it has been falsified, and insofar as it makes claims that can't be tested, it can be ignored.

Of all the developed nations throughout Christendom, only the United States has a significant number of creationists, and they're the minority even here! Every other predominantly-Christian country tends to regard creationism as an incredulous, (if not insane) radical fringe movement which is an almost exclusively American phenomenon, and not taken seriously anywhere else. Poll after poll continues to reveal that, around the world, most evolutionists are Christian, and most Christians are evolutionists. So evolution is not synonymous with atheism, and creationism isn't synonymous with Christianity either. Most creationists aren't even Christians! There are millions more Muslim and Hindu creationists than Christian ones.

So it's the same thing over and over and over and over again with these people, and we cannot allow them to crawl under another rock and subvert the Constitution through evolution anymore. It is time to expose them. And either agree with them and say, yes, that's what America needs to be, a socialist progressive state. Or expose it and exterminate. Exterminate the thought of the progressive movement. Don't allow it to fester anymore.

Take the initiative. Go to work, and above all co-operate and don't hold back on one another or try to gain at the expense of another. Any success in such lopsidedness will be increasingly short-lived. These are the synergetic rules that evolution is employing and trying to make clear to us. They are not man-made laws. They are the infinitely accommodative laws of the intellectual integrity governing universe.

Buckminster Fuller

In contrast to the arbitrarily complicated evolution of a (nonintegrable) classical system, all a quantum state ever does is move in circles.

Sean M. Carroll

We are sculptors finding ourselves in the evolution of choosing, not in the results of choice.

Things have gone downhill since Mom decided a modal average dose of old-time religion was an essential part of her upbringing, to the point that absolutely the best thing in the world Tante Annette could send her is some scam programmed by Daddy to take her away. If it doesn't work, Mom will take her to Church tonight, and she's certain she'll end up making a scene again. Amber's tolerance of willful idiocy is diminishing rapidly, and while building up her memetic immunity might be the real reason Mom's forcing this shit on her—it's always hard to tell with Mom—things have been tense ever since she got expelled from Sunday school for mounting a spirited defense of the theory of evolution.

The bondage of the Negro brought captive from Africa is one of the greatest dramas in history, and the writer who merely sees in that ordeal something to approve or condemn fails to understand the evolution of the human race.

Carter G. Woodson

No matter how abstractly formulated are a general theory of systems, a general theory of evolution and a general theory of communication, all three theoretical components are necessary for the specifically sociological theory of society. They are mutually interdependent.

Each business is a victim of Digital Darwinism, the evolution of consumer behavior when society and technology evolve faster than the ability to exploit it. Digital Darwinism does not discriminate. Every business is threatened.

All the art of analysis consists in saying a truth only when the other person is ready for it, has been prepared for it by an organic process of gradation and evolution.

The evolution of art has nothing to do with the revolution of society.

The neurobiologist Harry Jerison has made a long study of the trajectory of brain evolution since the advent of life on dry land.... the origin of new faunal groups is usually accompanied by a jump in the relative size of the brain, known as encephalization.... the first archaic mammals... were equipped with brains four to five times bigger than the average reptilian brain... primates are twice as encephalized as the average mammal. Within primates, the apes... are some twice the average size. And humans are three times as encephalized as the average ape.

There is no general reason to expect evolution to be progressive – even in the weak, value-neutral sense. There will be times when increased size of some organ is favoured and other times when decreased size is favoured. Most of the time, average-sized individuals will be favoured in the population and both extremes will be penalised. During these times the population exhibits evolutionary stasis (i. e., no change) with respect to the factor being measured. If we had a complete fossil record and looked for trends in some particular dimension, such as leg length, we would expect to see periods of no change alternating with fitful continuations or reversals in direction – like a weathervane in changeable, gusty weather.

Richard Dawkins

Evolution…is—a change from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity, to a definite coherent heterogeneity.

Herbert Spencer

The real question is, Did God use evolution as His plan? If it could be shown that man, instead of being made in the image of God, is a development of beasts we would have to accept it, regardless of its effort, for truth is truth and must prevail. But when there is no proof we have a right to consider the effect of the acceptance of an unsupported hypothesis.

William Jennings Bryan

Our culture has a universal myth in which we see emotion as more complex and obscure than intellect. Indeed, emotion might be "deeper" in some sense of prior evolution, but this need not make it harder to understand; in fact, I think today we actually know much more about emotion than about reason.

I am participating in the evolution of inspired action.

Wind, earthquake, fire—meteorology, seismology, physics—pass in review, as we have been reviewing the natural forces of evolution; the Lord was not in them. Afterwards, a stirring, an awakening in the organ of the brain, a voice which asks "What doest thou here?"

Arthur Eddington

No one supposed that dinoflagellates might actively kill fish as an evolved response for their own specific advantage, including a potential nutritional benefit for the algal cells. And yet the dinoflagellates do seem to be killing and eating fishes in a manner suggesting active evolution for this most peculiar reversal.

Stephen Jay Gould