Quotes About Evolution

Darwinian evolution is slow and gradual, step by step. Such an evolution can explain micro-evolution but not macro-evolution. For example, how did the eye evolve? The idea behind Darwinism is that organisms adapt, and that nature selects only those genetic changes which are the mutations that serve a good purpose for adaptation. So taken this way, the eye cannot develop gradually because one-thousandth or one-millionth of an eye would be of no value for survival. So generally this question rules out Darwinism as an adequate theory for macro-evolution.

Evolution is a process of creating patterns of increasing order....I believe that it's the evolution of patterns that constitutes the ultimate story of our world. Evolution works through indirection: each stage or epoch uses the information-processing methods of the previous epoch to create the next.

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?

Alfred Russel Wallace, the codiscoverer of the theory of natural selection. Following their twin announcements of the theory in 1858, both Darwin and Wallace struggled like Laocoöns with the serpentine problem of human evolution and its encoiling difficulty of consciousness. But where Darwin clouded the problem with his own naivete, seeing only continuity in evolution, Wallace could not do so.

Darwinan evolution is limited to the biological aspect but before that happened the molecules themselves had to evolve to enable this further (biological) evolution.

The evolution of humans can not only be seen as the grand total of their wars; it is also defined by the evolution of the human mind and the development of the human consciousness.

By understanding evolution as the expression of universal intelligence, now becoming conscious of itself within us, and as us, we overcome the dichotomy between current evolutionists who see no design in evolution, and creationists who often propose and anthropomorphic God as creator.

There's a bait and switch going on here because the critics want the textbooks to question whether evolution occurred. And of course they don't because scientists don't question whether evolution occurred.

The theory of evolution is impossible. At base, in spirit of appearances, no one any longer believes in it... Evolution is a kind of dogma which the priests no longer believe, but which they maintain for their people.

After all, the universe required ten billion years of evolution before life was even possible; the evolution of the stars and the evolving of new chemical elements in the nuclear furnaces of the stars were indispensable prerequisites for the generation of life.

This world is not a middle point in evolution. It's one step down from the middle point in evolution. This is the world of desire and fulfillment, frustration, but at least once in a while you can go to Burger King.

As a consequence, geneticists described evolution simply as a change in gene frequencies in populations, totally ignoring the fact that evolution consists of the two simultaneous but quite separate phenomena of adaptation and diversification.

Evolution is the law of policies: Darwin said it, Socrates endorsed it, Cuvier proved it and established it for all time in his paper on The Survival of the Fittest. These are illustrious names, this is a mighty doctrine: nothing can ever remove it from its firm base, nothing dissolve it, but evolution.

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.

Evolution is fascinating to watch. To me it is the most interesting when one can observe the evolution of a single man.

Most of what we know about human evolution comes from these: the fossilized bones of our ancestors. With their help, we've traced our evolution from small furry creatures to the big-brained beings we've become today. But bones can't tell us everything.

It's like in biological evolution: The population will evolve, even though individuals can't. The same thing happens in the corporate world: The population of business units within corporations evolves, even though individual business units can't. That's because the capabilities of business units reside in their processes and their values, and by their very nature, processes and values are inflexible and meant not to change.

Nowhere 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.

The 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.

We're in the midst of an evolution, not a revolution.

The pressure was always there, but I feel like it was almost invisible to me. I had too much going on once I got rolling with Evolution and won my first title. They say the cream rises to the top, and I felt like the cream. I rose to the top real quick, and I was surrounded by Triple H, Ric Flair, Shawn Michaels, Undertaker, these guys who were very well respected in the profession, and they wanted to work with me.

Tantra is for a person who has reached a point in their spiritual evolution where everything looks the same.

I think it's stripped down as far as electronics go, but we just wanted to write a record that we felt better represented how we sound live with more of a rock feel, which is the direction we've been heading. It's just an evolution of the band throughout the years. We worked on this record longer than any other record, so I don't know if "stripped down" is how I would put it; I think it is a little bit more raw sounding.

The vast majority of beings who incarnate on this planet are at the stage of their evolution where power is the dominant theme. They are learning about power. That is why we live in a world where there are so many wars and so much destruction.

Evolution is a myth. God creates the future the way he wants it.

Places come to exist in our imaginations because of stories, and so do we. When we reach for a "sense of place," we posit an intimate relationship to a set of stories connected to a particular location, such as Hong Kong or the Grand Canyon or the bed where we were born, thinking of histories and the evolution of personalities in a local context. Having "a sense of self" means possessing a set of stories about who we are and with whom and why.

To put it simply, no Darwin, no Hitler. Hitler tried to speed up evolution, to help it along, and millions suffered and died in unspeakable ways because of it.

As much as I think John Coltrane belongs on the list, I think without Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young, both of whom defined improvising on the tenor sax, there would not have been the evolution of the craft by John Coltrane.

So many of the wars in history, thousands and thousands of them for the past five, six, seven thousand years, have been related to differences in Truth claims. If we can evolve beyond that problem, then I think there's some chance that we could retire the whole institution of war and begin to focus on the peaceful evolution of humanity.

Evolution is an indispensable component of any satisfying explanation of our psychology.

Enlightenment is not so much a hard-won achievement, much less a "creation," but instead is deep relaxation and recovery of our natural condition. You come to see the evolution of the soul, the soul's journey, as a realization of what has always been there in the first place.

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.

The evolution of a bourgeoisie is a healthy phenomenon when it grows and prospers thanks to bourgeois values: hard work, honesty, personal responsibility.

The initial configuration of the universe may have been chosen by God, or it may itself have been determined by the laws of science. In either case, it would seem that everything in the universe would then be determined by evolution according to the laws of science, so it is difficult to see how we can be masters of our fate.

The Silly Putty-like malleability of the institution [marriage], in fact, is the only reason we still have the thing at all. Very few people... would accept marriage on it's thirteenth-century terms. Marriage survives, in other words, precisely because it evolves. (Though I suppose this would not be a very persuasive argument to those who probably also don't believe in evolution).

Fish deserve to be caught for they are lazy. Two million years of evolution and they still haven't got out of the water.

Some people make it hard for me to believe in universal evolution.

CANNOT BELIEVE BOTH GOSPEL AND EVOLUTION. I say most emphatically, you cannot believe in this theory of the origin of man, and at the same time accept the plan of salvation as set forth by the Lord our God. You must choose the one and reject the other, for they are in direct conflict and there is a gulf separating them which is so great that it cannot be bridged, no matter how much one may try to do so.

Spiritual evolution is a movement from the states of mind that reflect life less accurately to the states of mind that reflect life more accurately.

I think the whole of music comes down to one's personality. It's not about the notes or how you press the keys; it's where you are in your evolution of consciousness.

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

Cultures are not the source of all morals, only a limited set of morals. Cultures can be graded and judged morally according to their contribution to the evolution of life.

Mesarovic and Pestel are critical of the Forrester-Meadows world view, which is that of a homogeneous system with a fully predetermined evolution in time once the initial conditions are specified.

I'm still my parent's child, I'm still me, but I made a choice. I evolved into Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. I think it has to do with evolution.

There will be a change in worldview from materialism and failure to conscious evolution. And everyone's potential to participate!

It is imperative that we do not fear challenges that we have attracted to promote our growth. Every obstacle we encounter is an opportunity for spiritual evolution.

By the cold Darwinian logic of natural selection, evolution codifies happenstance into strategy.

In the tangled hierarchy sinner and saint, divine and diabolical, sacred and profane are different faces of our collective Being. Therefore angry activism driven by rage, however justified it seems, is really not going to work. I believe that the tangled hierarchy wants us to move to the next state of evolution and very strongly desires us to take that quantum leap of creativity.