Popular quotes about Evolution! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
You know, Darwin said through natural selection things go gradually, and he was talking about pigeon's evolution or horses evolving, getting faster. But in fact if you look at evolution on a bigger scale, cosmic evolution and you look at culture evolution you see it jumps, it goes through phase changes, and that's very exciting.
Charles JencksThe story of Mirror Mirror is in many ways a story about evolution. Its about the evolution of a child into an adult. Its about the evolution of those dwarves into something a little less rock-like, a little more humanoid. Its about the evolution of history, too, from the darkness of the Middle Ages into the light of the Age of Reason.
Gregory MaguireEvolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today.
Michael RuseIs evolution a theory, a system, or a hypothesis? It is much more it is a general postulate to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must henceforward bow and which they must satisfy in order to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light which illuminates all facts, a trajectory which all lines of thought must follow this is what evolution is.
Pierre Teilhard de ChardinAs 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.
Ram DassEvolution has long been badly taught. In particular, students - and even professional biologists - acquire theories of evolution without any deep understanding of what problem these theories attempt to solve. They learn but little of the evolution of evolutionary theory.
Gregory BatesonMan wants to see nature and evolution as separate from human activities. There is a natural world, and there is man. But man also belongs to the natural world. If he is a ferocious predator, that too is part of evolution. If cod and haddock and other species cannot survive because man kills them, something more adaptable will take their place. Nature, the ultimate pragmatist, doggedly searches for something that works. But as the cockroach demonstrates, what works best in nature does not always appeal to us.
Mark KurlanskyDeath seems to have been a rather late invention in evolution. One can go a long way in evolution before encountering an authentic corpse.
George WaldReincarnation, at least as I conceive it, does not nullify what we know about evolution and genetics. It suggests, however, that there may be two streams of evolution -- the biological one and a personal one -- and that during terrestrial lives these streams may interact.
Ian StevensonA remarkable parallel, which I think has never been noticed, obtains between the facts of social evolution on the one hand, and of zological evolution as expounded by Mr. Darwin on the other.
William JamesWe can move no faster than the evolution of our language, and this is certainly part of what the psychedelics are about: they force the evolution of language.
Terence McKennaThe fact of evolution is the backbone of biology, and biology is thus in the peculiar position of being a science founded on an unproved theory -is it then a science or a faith? Belief in the theory of evolution is thus exactly parallel to belief in special creation - both are concepts which believers know to be true but neither, up to the present, has been capable of proof.
L. Harrison MatthewsI do feel that evolution is being controlled by some sort of divine engineer. I can't help thinking that. And this engineer knows exactly what he or she is doing and why, and where evolution is headed. That's why we've got giraffes and hippopotami and the clap.
Kurt VonnegutI believe in the theory of evolution, but I believe as well in the allegorical truth of creation theory. In other words, I believe that evolution, including the principle of natural selection, is one of the tools used by God to create mankind. Mankind is then a participant in the creation of the universe itself, so that we have a closed loop. I believe that there is a level on which science and religious metaphor are mutually compatible.
Christopher LanganOur crisis is a birth. We are one living system and we have come to the limit of one phase of natural growth on a finite planet We must learn ethical evolution quickly As we seek to facilitate a gentle birth, a graceful and nonviolent transition to the next stage of our evolution, we will discover a natural pattern, a design of our birth transition, and develop a plan to cooperate with this design.
Barbara Marx HubbardConventional 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.
Steve HouseDarwin matters because evolution matters. Evolution matters because science matters. Science matters because it is the preeminent story of our age, an epic saga about who we are, where we came from and where we are going.
Michael ShermerWe are moving from unconscious evolution through natural selection to conscious evolution by choice.
Barbara Marx HubbardThe daily grinding of evolution, as accelerated by technology, churns out more and more complex organisms, with higher rates of energy use, and with increasing specialization. Minds are the ideal way to express complexity, energy density, increasing specialization, expanding diversity -- all in one system. Mindedness is what evolution produces. Mindedness is what technology wants, too.
Kevin KellyThere are only two possible explanations as to how life arose: Spontaneous generation arising to evolution or a supernatural creative act of God.... There is no other possibility. Spontaneous generation was scientifically disproved 120 years ago by Louis Pasteur and others, but that just leaves us with only one other possibility... that life came as a supernatural act of creation by God, but I can't accept that philosophy because 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.
George WaldWords have a genealogy and it's easier to trace the evolution of a single word than the evolution of a language.
Daniel DennettThis 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.
Julian HuxleyFor 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.
Rudolf SteinerScience is the key to our future, and if you donโt believe in science, then youโre holding everybody back. And itโs fine if you as an adult want to run around pretending or claiming that you donโt believe in evolution, but if we educate a generation of people who donโt believe in science, thatโs 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.
Bill NyeI 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.
Sherwood WashburnEvolution, thus, is merely contingent on certain processes articulated by Darwin: variation and selection. No longer is a fixed object transformed, as in transformational evolution, but an entirely new start is, so to speak, made in every generation.
Ernst MayrOnce evolution gets a good basic design, it tends to throw away the variants and concentrate on the near-infinite diversity within that design.
Dan SimmonsHuman nature, as manifested in tribalism and nationalism, provides the momentum of the machinery of human evolution.
Arthur KeithAll life is evolving, for evolution is God's law; and man grows slowly and steadily along with the rest.
Charles Webster LeadbeaterWe need to attack the false foundation of autonomous human reasoning that leads to evolution and millions of years, and proclaim that God's revealed Word is authoritative and its history of the world is foundational to Christian morality and the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Ken HamNowhere was Darwin able to point to one bona fide case of natural selection having actually generated evolutionary change in nature....Ultimately, the Darwinian theory of evolution is no more nor less than the great cosmogenic myth of the twentieth century.
Michael DentonThe decisive moment in human evolution is perpetual. That is why the revolutionary spiritual movements that declare all former things worthless are in the right, for nothing has yet happened.
Franz KafkaSome evolutionists will protest that we are caricaturing their view of adaptation. After all, do they not admit genetic drift, allometry, and a variety of reasons for nonadaptive evolution?
Stephen Jay GouldI finally became convinced that the theory of creation actually had a much better scientific basis than the theory of evolution, for the creation model was actually better able to explain the physical and biological complexity in the world.
Roy SpencerSpeed is what distinguishes intelligence. No bird discovers how to fly: evolution used a trillion bird-years to 'discover' that โ where merely hundreds of person-years sufficed.
Marvin MinskyMy personal style is a continued evolution. I can see I've had a different style for every different age in the period of my life. It's difficult for me to say what is my style because I change all the time. I change every eight months, it's so weird.
Alessandra MastronardiWhen 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.
Stuart WildeAs to harmonizing the theory of evolution with the Biblical account of creation, I do not believe it can be done, and I do not see why it should be. The story of Genesis is beautiful, and profoundly significant as symbolism: there is no good reason to torture it into conformity with modern theory.
Will DurantAs a chemist, I wanted to ask myself the question frustrated by biology: What is the minimal unit of matter that can undergo Darwinian evolution?
Leroy CroninSolutions come through evolution. They come through asking the right questions, because the answers pre-exist. It is the questions that we must define and discover. You don't invent the answer-you reveal the answer.
Jonas SalkThere's almost no food that isn't genetically modified. Genetic modification is the basis of all evolution. Things change because our planet is subjected to a lot of radiation, which causes DNA damage, which gets repaired, but results in mutations, which create a ready mixture of plants that people can choose from to improve agriculture.
Nina FedoroffFolks, it's time to evolve. That's why we're troubled. You know why our institutions are failing us, the church, the state, everything's failing? It's because, um - they're no longer relevant. We're supposed to keep evolving. Evolution did not end with us growing opposable thumbs. You do know that, right?
Bill HicksYou 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.
Noam ChomskyWe have new media, new forms of connectivity, and an enormous transference of knowledge. When you study evolution, you see that when new genes meet and multiply, they create new contexts and new species. In a sense, the gene-pool of knowledge and of people connecting at all levels is literally spawning a kind of mind-pool of possibilities.
Jean HoustonWhere the world is going and what technology is leading us to in terms of the evolution of humanity is an incredibly valuable thing to understand.
Tony Robbins