Quotes About Evolution

My attempts to demonstrate evolution by an experiment carried on for more than 40 years have completely failed.....It is not even possible to make a caricature of an evolution out of paleobiological facts...The idea of an evolution rests on pure belief.

All scientists agree that evolution has occurred-that all life comes from a common ancestry, that there has been extinction, and that new taxa, new biological groups, have arisen. The question is, is natural selection enough to explain evolution? Is it the driver of evolution?

As the haves and have-nots split further and further apart, destabilization ultimately leads to revolution, not evolution. If we're playing the evolution vs. revolution game, we are closer to revolution than we are to evolution in my concept.

Religion's biggest crime is to slow down the Human's Intellectual Evolution! It creates an illusion as if there is a safe port somewhere. The truth is that there is no safe port; man is in emptiness! Intellectual Evolution is our only chance to build a safe port by ourselves!

Evolution pays and that is why there is evolution

People sometimes try to score debating points by saying, Evolution is only a theory. That is correct, but it's important to understand what that means. It is also only a theory that the world goes round the Sun - it's just a theory for which there is an immense amount of evidence. There are many scientific theories that are in doubt. Even within evolution, there is some room for controversy. But that we are cousins of apes and jackals and starfish, let's say, that is a fact in the ordinary sense of the word.

...evolution is not a religious tenet, to which one swears allegiance or belief as a matter of faith.. It is a factual reality of the empirical world. Just as one would not say 'I believe in gravity," one should not proclaim 'I believe in evolution.

The evolution of the brain not only overshot the needs of prehistoric man, it is the only example of evolution providing a species with an organ which it does not know how to use.

Evolution has no long-term goal. There is no long-distance target, no final perfection to serve as a criterion for selection, although human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution.

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.

The first point one has to get straight in discussions like this, is that ID is not the opposite of evolution. Rather, it is the opposite of Darwinism, which says life evolved by an utterly unguided, undirected mechanism. If god directed the process of evolution, or rigged the universe to produce complex life, then that is not Darwinism - it is intelligent design.

No evolution is accomplished in nature without revolution. Periods of very slow changes are succeeded by periods of violent changes. Revolutions are as necessary for evolution as the slow changes which prepare them and succeed them.

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.

Evolution is not a fact. Evolution doesn't even qualify as a theory or as a hypothesis. It is a metaphysical research program, and it is not really testable science.

In my opinion, using creation and evolution as topics for critical-thinking exercises in primary and secondary schools is virtually guaranteed to confuse students about evolution and may lead them to reject one of the major themes in science.

I remember writing a paper on human evolution in 1944, and I simply left Piltdown out. You could make sense of human evolution if you didn't try to put Piltdown into it.

Evolution answers some questions but reveals many more questions. Some of these questions at this stage appear to be unanswerable in the light of present scientific knowledge. In common parlance: `The more you know, the more you know you don't know.

As far as I'm concerned, if there is a supreme being then He chose organic evolution as a way of bringing into existence the natural world... which doesn't seem to me to be necessarily blasphemous at all.

The first step in the evolution of ethics is a sense of solidarity with other human beings.

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.

Perhaps the most majestic feature of our whole existence is that while our intelligences are powerful enough to penetrate deeply into the evolution of this quite incredible Universe, we still have not the smallest clue to our own fate.

When the first human began to read and write, he or she set the world upon a new evolution. Similarly, if a few individuals have the strength and the power to walk away from the restrictions of the world and to stand fearlessly beyond it, eventually, in some distant millennium, all mankind will also come to that same liberation.

Evolution is a fairy tale for adults

Single cells analyze thousands of stimuli from the microenvironment they inhabit. The more awareness an organism has of its environment, the better its chances for survival. When cells band together they increase their awareness exponentially. Division of labor among the cells in the community offers an additional survival advantage. The efficiency it enables more cells to live on less. Evolution is based on an instructive, cooperative interaction among organisms and their environment enables life forms to survive and evolve in a dynamic world.

You can imagine a different world in which a number of species developed with different genetically determined linguistic systems. It hasn't happened in evolution. What has happened is that one species has developed, and the genetic structure of this species happens to involve a variety of intricate abstract principles of linguistic organization that, therefore, necessarily constrain every language, and, in fact, create the basis for learning language as a way of organizing experience rather than constituting something learned from experience.

Metaphysics of Evolution: What is Matter & Life? 'Recent discoveries from Russia confirm that DNA / Genes are resonant structures which are subtly interconnected to their environment. i.e. Genetic material can be manipulated by waves with certain resonant frequencies.'

It is curious how there seems to be an instinctive disgust in Man for his nearest ancestors and relations. If only Darwin could conscientiously have traced man back to the Elephant or the Lion or the Antelope, how much ridicule and prejudice would have been spared to the doctrine of Evolution.

This is a living planet. Look around. Mars, Venus, Jupiter. Look beyond our solar system. Where else is there a place that works, that is just right for the likes of us? It has not happened just instantly. It is vulnerable to our actions. But it's the result of four and a half billion years of evolution, of change over time. And it changes every day, all the time. It would be in our interest to try to maintain a certain level of stability that has enabled us to prosper, to not wreck the very systems that give us life.

So at the request of educators I wrote the World Core Curriculum, the product of the United Nations, the meta-organism of human and planetary evolution.

I really doubt whether evolution ever works, how then come Mothers have only two hands

This evolution may compromise Java's claim of being simpler than C++, but my guess is that the effort will make Java a better language than it is today.

To get really high is to forget yourself. And to forget yourself is to see everything else. And to see everything else is to become an understanding molecule in evolution, a conscious tool of the universe.

Reincarnation is a cyclic process. There are endless levels of creation, different universes. In each one something similar is taking place, the evolution of spirit through matter.

I have come to recognize evolution not only as an active process that I am experiencing at the time, but as something I can guide by the choices I make.

To keep up even a worthwhile tradition means vitiating the idea behind it which must necessarily be in a constant state of evolution: it is mad to try to express new feelings in a mummified form.

In nothing is there more evolution than the American mind.

I think of evolution as an error-making and error-correcting process, and we are constantly learning from experience.

I have been a biologist for a long time, and I hope I never stop getting shivers in my spine when I think about the beauty of how we come to know things in biology. Biologists make predictions, then they go out into the field or the lab to see if their predictions hold up. When hundreds of predictions of this sort are fulfilled, a theory reaches the point where it becomes certain, at least on a broad level. And that is where we are with evolution.

In talking of evolution, it is common to have in mind a tree.

It is time... to end the long-standing and unproductive methodological debate over 'originalism' versus 'dynamism' or 'evolution' and focus instead on how, as a substantive matter, we should interpret the Constitution in the twenty-first century, and what it has to say on questions unimaginable to our eighteenth-century Framers.

Forty thousand years of evolution and we've barely even tapped the vastness of human potential.

You can't really be scientifically literate if you don't understand evolution. And you can't be an educated member of society if you don't understand science.

In the last century, as we learned more about genes, we were able to devise ways of accelerating evolution.

Life is all business. Spend your energy to get joy, happiness, evolution, and to gain more ability to enjoy. In this field we spend our energy. We never use our time, energy, speech, or ability to do something that doesn't help us grow and improve our life. It's not worth it.

All living beings have received their weapons through the same process of evolution that moulded their impulses and inhibitions; for the structural plan of the body and the system of behaviour of a species are parts of the same whole.... Wordsworth is right: there is only one being in possession of weapons which do not grow on his body and of whose working plan, therefore, the instincts of his species know nothing and in the usage of which he has no correspondingly adequate inhibition.

In my lifetime, we've gone from Eisenhower to George W. Bush. We've gone from John F. Kennedy to Al Gore. If this is evolution, I believe that in twelve years, we'll be voting for plants.

God was created by evolution, inside the imagination of a primate.

Wherever people are in their evolution, they start to come into that hope and feeling like they are okay, that they're going to be okay.