Quotes About Evolution

Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion - a full-fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality. I am an ardent evolutionist and an ex-Christian, but I must admit that in this one complaint - ...and Mr. Gish is but one of many to make it - the literalists are absolutely right. Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution today.

If you define evolution as merely meaning change over time, then I don't see any problem with a person being a Christian and believing in evolution. But that's not how textbooks define evolution. They define evolution as being random and undirected without plan or purpose.

Virulence appears in a new light which cannot but be alarming to humanity; unless nature, in her evolution down the ages (an evolution which, as we now know, has been going on for millions, nay, hundreds of millions of years), has finally exhausted all the possibilities of producing virulent or contagious diseases - which does not seem very likely.

I think we have got to start again and go right back to first principles. The argument I shall advance, surprising as it may seem coming from the author of the earlier chapters, is that, for an understanding of the evolution of modern man, we must begin by throwing out the gene as the sole basis of our ideas on evolution. If there is only one Creator who made the tiger and the lamb, the cheetah and the gazelle, what is He playing at? Is he a sadist who enjoys spectator blood sports? ... Is he manuvering to maximize David Attenborough's television ratings?

An essay is something that tracks the evolution of a human mind. It tracks the evolution of a single consciousness in order to give us an experience - an experience of looking for something and then finding ourselves in a different place by the time we've finished our journey.

But I think schools also ought to be fair to all views. Because, frankly, Darwinism is not an established scientific fact. It is a theory of evolution, that's why it's called the theory of evolution.

The business of proving evolution has reached a stage when it is futile for biologists to work merely to discover more and more evidence of evolution. Those who choose to believe that God created every biological species separately in the state we observe them, but made them in a way calculated to lead us to the conclusion that they are the products of an evolutionary development are obviously not open to argument. All that can be said is that their belief is an implicit blasphemy, for it imputes to God an appalling deviousness.

Evolution throws a wonderful light on all the struggles, eccentricities, tortuous developments of the human conscience in the past. It is the only theory of morals that does. And evolution throws just as much light on the ethical and social struggle today; and it is the only theory that does. What a strange age ours is from the religious point of view! What a hopeless age from the philosopher's point of view! Yet it is a very good age, the best that ever was. No evolutionist is a pessimist.

Change itself is changing. The process of evolution itself is evolving. There is a meta-evolution, or a metachange that is taking place. And in that process what you see is actually an increasing contrast between change and the eternal or the unchanging.

I want to put it back together now, this artistic expression that contains religious feeling. I want to investigate: What was the origin? What's happened in the human mind? Can we trace back the moment of the creation of human consciousness? And why did only humans gain consciousness, not other animals? So, evolution? I don't know whether or not I can believe evolution. Maybe we wait for another 100,000 years and then apes get consciousness.

The requirements for our evolution have changed. Survival is no longer sufficient. Our evolution now requires us to develop spiritually-to become emotionally aware and make responsible choices. It requires us to align ourselves with the values of the soul-harmony, cooperation, sharing, and reverence for life.

There is not enough evidence, consistent evidence to make it as fact, and I say that because for theory to become a fact, it needs to consistently have the same results after it goes through a series of tests. The tests that they put- that they use to support evolution do not have consistent results. Now too many people are blindly accepting evolution as fact. But when you get down to the hard evidence, it's merely a theory.

Conventional sports have undergone an evolution in training methods during the last fifty years. Curiosity and the inherent improvement brought about by competition have driven this evolution to a state of high refinement such that today's athletes have a very specialized approach to training at the elite levels.

McIntosh is persuasive in his arguments that the scientific facts of evolution cannot stand alone ... science shows that historical evolution, whatever its contingencies, is itself on a trajectory of values development. McIntosh has well-researched his sources and integrated them with seminal insight.

I mean, obviously, one of the strongest arguments against evolution and selection of the fittest and progress, which is part of evolution, is the current field of the presidential candidates. We started off with Washington and Adams and Jefferson and then we had Lincoln, and now we moved ahead and look where we are now.

In scientific thought, the concept functions all the better for being cut off from all background images. In its full exercise, the scientific concept is free from all the delays of its genetic evolution, an evolution which is consequently explained by simple psychology. The virility of knowledge increases with each conquest of the constructive abstraction.

This earth is one of the rare spots in the cosmos where mind has flowered. Man is a product of nearly three billion years of evolution, in whose person the evolutionary process has at last become conscious of itself and its possibilities. Whether he likes it or not, he is responsible for the whole further evolution of our planet.

For every human illness, somewhere in the world there exists a plant which is the cure. I believe that there is a healing potential locked inside plants which is integral with their evolution, just as it is part of human evolution to learn to tap this wonderful gift of Nature.

Science is the key to our future, and if you don’t believe in science, then you’re holding everybody back. And it’s fine if you as an adult want to run around pretending or claiming that you don’t believe in evolution, but if we educate a generation of people who don’t believe in science, that’s a recipe for disaster. We talk about the Internet. That comes from science. Weather forecasting. That comes from science. The main idea in all of biology is evolution. To not teach it to our young people is wrong.

Evolution was Vladimir Ilich Lenin's problem. Lenin lead the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and took over Russia. He killed the Zar [ sic ] and his family in cold blood. There would not be communism in Russia today if had not been for Charles Darwin's book on evolution.

In the evolution of knowledge-mistaken and unnecessary beliefs are forced out and supplanted by truer and more necessary knowledge. So too in the evolution of feelings, which takes place by means of art. Lower feelings-less kind and less needed for the good of humanity-are forced out and replaced by kinder feelings which better serve us individually and collectively. This is the purpose of art.

Evolution is true, it happens, it is the way the world is, and we too are one of its products. This does not mean that evolution does not have metaphysical implications; I remain convinced that this is the case.

My mission is to tell the story of the birth of ourselves as a universal humanity, awakening all of us to our unique opportunity to participate through our own conscious evolution.

When you deal with something like compassion for physical pain, which we know is very, very old in evolution - we can find evidence for it in nonhuman species - the brain processes it at a faster speed. Compassion for mental pain took many seconds longer.

There's something about the evolution of television where it evolved from to the things that we're now watching and loving. It evolved from film writers, film actors, and I think gradually people are easing themselves into the amount of time they have.

Woman's rights should come by evolution, and not by revolution. I want a little woman's right tried first, and then, if the experience is bad, we can go back on our track; if good, forward.

Our main source of psychic energy in the future will depend on our ability to understand this symbol of evolution in an acceptable context of interpretation. Only in the context of an emergent universe will the human project come to an integral understanding of itself. We must, however, come to experience the universe in its psychic as well as in its physical aspect. We need to experience the sequence of evolutionary transformations as moments of grace, and also as celebration moments in our new experience of the sacred.

Essential to the theory of evolution is the premise that everything has come into being by itself.

There probably is no more important quest in all science than the attempt to understand those very particular events in evolution by which brains worked out that special trick that has enabled them to add to the cosmic scheme of things: color, sound, pain, pleasure, and all the other facets of mental experience.

We don't have a revolution, and we don't have the time for evolution, where does it come from? It must come from some kind of shared experience that everybody agrees with.

The endorsement process is an evolution. What you try to do is you endorse someone that you believe in and their ideas and their solutions align with yours.

No matter how numerous they may be, mutations do not produce any kind of evolution.

If evolution exists in every living species, likewise so too does devolution.

Evolution is as much a fact as the heat of the sun.

No human mind may measure the blessings conferred by the game of base ball on the soldiers of the Civil War. It had its earliest evolution when soldiers, North and South, were striving to forget their foes by cultivating, through this grand game, fraternal friendships with comrades in arms.

I think that evolution has had a hand in selecting people who had a sense of doing something beyond themselves.

It is an error to imagine that evolution signifies a constant tendency to increased perfection. That process undoubtedly involves a constant remodeling of the organism in adaptation to new conditions; but it depends on the nature of those conditions whether the direction of the modifications effected shall be upward or downward.

Every session attended by the analyst must have no history and no future. What is 'known' about the patient is of no further consequence: it is either false or irrelevant. If it is 'known' by patient and analyst, it is obsolete....The only point of importance in any session is the unknown. Nothing must be allowed to distract from intuiting that. In any session, evolution takes place. Out of the darkness and formlessness something evolves.

For most women, the success of conservative women is good for all of us, unless you believe in evolution. Actually, I take it back. The whole thing is a disaster.

Isn't it interesting how Christians are not afraid to teach their children about evolution?

Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid ... research and discussions ... with regard to the doctrine of evolution.

Since when has the world of computer software design been about what people want? This is a simple question of evolution. The day is quickly coming when every knee will bow down to a silicon fist, and you will all beg your binary gods for mercy.

I do not want to believe in God. Therefore I choose to believe in that which I know is scientifically impossible, spontaneous generation leading to evolution.

I believe that the thought that women together can change the world is emerging into the minds and hearts of many of us, and that the vessel for personal and planetary evolution is the circle with a spiritual center.

[Evolution is] one of the best documented, most compelling and exciting concepts in all of science.

I think that's what makes life interesting - the evolution of getting older, and it's kinda fascinating to me, the whole process.

In the evolution of mankind there has always been a certain degree of social coherence.

The evolution of a highly destined society must be moral; it must run in the grooves of the celestial wheels.