Theodosius Dobzhansky Quotes

35 Sourced Quotes

The creation... is not an event which happened in the remote past but is rather a living reality of the present. Creation is a process of evolution of which man is not merely a witness but a participant and a partner as well.

Theodosius Dobzhansky
There are still many people who are happy and comfortable adhering to fundamentalist creeds. This should cause no surprise, since a large majority of these believers are as unfamiliar with scientific findings as were people who lived centuries ago.

Theodosius Dobzhansky
One may detest nature and despise science, but it becomes more and more difficult to ignore them. Science in the modern world is not an entertainment for some devotees. It is on its way to becoming everybody's business.

Theodosius Dobzhansky
We must remember that heredity, development, and evolution are essentially epigenetic and not preformistic not. We do not inherit from our ancestors, close or remote, separate characters, functional or vestigial. What we do inherit is, instead, genes which determine the pattern of developmental processes.

Theodosius Dobzhansky
The long pageant of evolution extending over one billion years appears to have been brought about by fundamental causes which are still in operation and which can be experimented with today.

Theodosius Dobzhansky
Genetics, an important branch of biological science, has grown out of the humble peas planted by Mendel in a monastery garden.

Theodosius Dobzhansky
Nothing gives more pleasure to a rather common type of religious person than to point out that science cannot explain this or cannot account for that!

Theodosius Dobzhansky
The potentiality of mind must be present in the egg and the sperm and in the DNA molecules. But it does not follow that eggs and sperms themselves have minds. A stone has in it a potentiality to become a statue, but it does not follow that every stone has a statue concealed in it.

Theodosius Dobzhansky
Culture is not inherited through the genes. It is acquired, by every person for himself, through contacts with other people, who may or may not be biological relatives.

Theodosius Dobzhansky
Any evolution theory which disregard the established genetic principles is faulty at its source.

Theodosius Dobzhansky
Great ideas often seem simple and self-evident, but only after somebody has explained them to us. Then, how interesting they become! The act of insight is among the most exciting and pleasurable experiences a scientist can have, when he recognizes what all the time was there to be seen, and yet he did not see it.

Theodosius Dobzhansky
A new idea is unforeseeable until it has been germinated in somebody's mind, and a new discovery is not guaranteed until at least a glimmer of it is seen.

Theodosius Dobzhansky
Experience shows... that there is no way toward understanding of the mechanisms ofmacroevolutionary changes, which require time on geological scales, other than through understanding of microevolutionary processes observable within the span of a human lifetime, often controlled by man's will, and sometimes reproducible in laboratory experiments.

Theodosius Dobzhansky
Science and religion deal with different aspects of existence...These are the aspect of facts and the aspect of meaning. But there is one stupendous fact... the meaning of which they have ceaselessly tried to discover. This fact is Man.

Theodosius Dobzhansky
Science is cumulative knowledge. Each generation of scientists works to add to the treasury assembled by its predecessors. A discovery made today may not be significant or even comprehensible by itself, but it will make sense in conjunction with what was known before. Indeed this will usually have been necessary to its achievement.

Theodosius Dobzhansky
Science does more than collect facts; it makes sense of them. Great scientists are virtuosi of the art of discovering the meaning of what otherwise might seem barren observations.

Theodosius Dobzhansky
The mutation process alone, not corrected and guided by natural selection, would result in degeneration and extinction rather than improved adaptiveness.

Theodosius Dobzhansky
One does not really understand a scientific problem unless one knows at least in rough outline how it came to be formulated.

Theodosius Dobzhansky
Seen in the light of evolution, biology is, perhaps, intellectually the most satisfying and inspiring science. Without that light it becomes a pile of sundry facts — some of them interesting or curious but making no meaningful picture as a whole.

Theodosius Dobzhansky
No known human group... simply throw[s] out its dead without any ritual or ceremony. In stark contrast, no animal practices burial of dead individuals of its own species.

Theodosius Dobzhansky
The living world is not a single array... connected by unbroken series of intergrades.

Theodosius Dobzhansky
Marxists are more right than wrong when they argue that the problems scientists take up,. the way they go about solving them, and even the solutions they arc inclined to accept, arc conditioned by the intellectual, social, and economic environments in which they live and work.

Theodosius Dobzhansky
Man is the only living being who has a developed self-awareness and death-awareness.

Theodosius Dobzhansky
Does the evolutionary doctrine clash with religious faith? It does not. It is a blunder to mistake the Holy Scriptures for elementary textbooks of astronomy, geology, biology, and anthropology. Only if symbols are construed to mean what they are not intended to mean can there arise imaginary, insoluble conflicts. As pointed out above, the blunder leads to blasphemy: the Creator is accused of systematic deceitfulness.

Theodosius Dobzhansky
The evolution of life, and the evolutionary origin of mankind, are scientifically established as firmly and completely as any historical event not witnessed by human observers. Any concession to anti-evolutionists, suggesting that there are scientific reasons to doubt the facticity of evolution, would be propagating a plain untruth.

Theodosius Dobzhansky
Scientists often have a naive faith that if only they could discover enough facts about a problem, these facts would somehow arrange themselves in a compelling and true solution.

Theodosius Dobzhansky
No evidence is powerful enough to force acceptance of a conclusion that is emotionally distasteful.

Theodosius Dobzhansky
Nature's stern discipline enjoins mutual help at least as often as warfare. The fittest may also be the gentlest.

Theodosius Dobzhansky
The more we know, the better we realize that our knowledge is a little island in the midst of an ocean of ignorance.

Theodosius Dobzhansky
Nothing in biology makes sense, except in the light of evolution.

Theodosius Dobzhansky