Popular quotes about Evolution! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 59
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.
Nils Heribert-NilssonEvolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today.
Michael RuseIt is essential for evolution to become the central core of any educational system, because it is evolution, in the broad sense, that links inorganic nature with life, and the stars with the earth, and matter with mind, and animals with man. Human history is a continuation of biological evolution in a different form.
Julian HuxleyAs 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 BatesonVirulence 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.
Louis PasteurDeath seems to have been a rather late invention in evolution. One can go a long way in evolution before encountering an authentic corpse.
George WaldReligion'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!
Mehmet Murat IldanOnly a tiny fraction of corpses fossilize, and we are lucky to have as many intermediate fossils as we do. We could easily have had no fossils at all, and still the evidence for evolution from other sources, such as molecular genetics and geographical distribution, would be overwhelmingly strong. On the other hand, evolution makes the strong prediction that if a single fossil turned up in the wrong geological stratum, the theory would be blown out of the water.
Richard DawkinsReincarnation, 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 StevensonThe Pleiadians are very much part of our evolution right now, and I think one of the most common questions people ask, "What is in it for the Pleiadians? Why are they supporting us in this way?" The best answer is that they will benefit from our evolution, just as the whole universe will. As we evolve and come into a deeper understanding of our grandness, our sacred nature, then we become more connected into the universal community as a group, and we need to return to that whole God Consciousness state.
Christine McCormick DayThe cost of scientific advance is the humbling recognition that reality was not constructed to be easily grasped by the human mind. This is the cardinal tenet of scientific understanding. Our species and its ways of thinking are a product of evolution, not the purpose of evolution.
E. O. WilsonTaste is an evolution and refinement of oneโs personal likes and dislikes. This evolution takes place with a constant curiosity and interest in everything. The editing consequently refines the choices and defines taste.
Norma KamaliYoga, an ancient but perfect science, deals with the evolution of humanity. This evolution includes all aspects of one's being, from bodily health to self-realization.
B.K.S. IyengarThere'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.
Eugenie ScottApart from anything else, I am designed by evolution, like we all are: if we see a little thing like that, big eyes, tiny nose, we go 'aaah'. That's what evolution does. We are programmed to do that. So to find babies the most amazing, isn't surprising, I don't think.
David AttenboroughThat series of inventions by which man from age to age has remade his environment is a different kind of evolution -- not biological, but cultural evolution . . . "The Ascent of Man.
Jacob BronowskiNatural Selection is not Evolution. Yet, ever since the two words have been in common use, the theory of Natural Selection has been employed as a convenient abbreviation for the theory of Evolution by means of Natural Selection, put forward by Darwin and Wallace. This has had the unfortunate consequence that the theory of Natural Selection itself has scarcely ever, if ever, received separate consideration.
Ronald FisherMany people think the Pleiadians are in spirit form, but they're not. They exist as a civilization in the fifth/sixth dimensional evolution, which is unconditional love, so they hold a much higher frequency of evolution than we do here on the planet at this time, and they are here to really bring the knowledge, the understanding, and initiations for us to align back to our own personal power.
Christine McCormick DayWe want to be special. We want our place in the cosmos to be central. We want evolution-even godless evolution-to have been directed toward us so that we stand at the pinnacle of nature's ladder of progress. Rewind the tape of life and we want to believe that we (Homo Sapiens) would appear again and again. Would we? Probably not.
Michael ShermerI 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.
Hiroshi SugimotoWe are the climactic generation of human cultural evolution, and in the microcosm of our lives the macrocosm of the evolution of the human race is playing itself out.
William Irwin ThompsonIn the complex course of its evolution, life exhibits a remarkable contrast to the tendency expressed in the Second Law to Thermodynamics. Where the Second Law expressed an irreversible progression toward increased entropy and disorder, life evolves continually higher levels of order. The still more remarkable fact is that this evolutionary drive to greater and greater order also is irreversible. Evolution does not go backward.
J. H. RushEvolution is fascinating to watch. To me it is the most interesting when one can observe the evolution of a single man.
Shana AlexanderEvolution goes beyond what went before, but because it must embrace what went before, then its very nature is to transcend and include and thus it has an inherent directionality, a secret impulse, toward increasing depth, increasing intrinsic value, increasing consciousness. In order for evolution to move at all, it must move in those directions-there's no place else for it to go!
Ken WilberIn 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.
Eugenie ScottThere is behavioral ecology, which looks closely at the difference different ecologies make to behavior and other features of animals and humans. There's evolutionary individual psychology, there's evolutionary social psychology. In Darwin's terms, evolution couldn't exist without variation, and variation is important in behavioral genetics. And so on, and so on. There are so many instances in which evolution actually sharpens the precision, I think, with which one can find out the importance of differences. We're interested in differences as well as commonalities.
Brian BoydThe evidence for evolution is so compelling that the only way to save the creation theory is to assume that God deliberately planted enormous quantities of evidence to make it look as if evolution had happened.
Richard DawkinsOne reason education undoes belief is its teaching of evolution; Darwin's own drift from orthodoxy to agnosticism was symptomatic. Martin Lings is probably right in saying that more cases of loss of religious faith are to be traced to the theory of evolution ... than to anything else.
Huston SmithThe distribution of species on islands and continents throughout the world is exactly what you'd expect if evolution was a fact. The distribution of fossils in space and in time are exactly what you would expect if evolution were a fact. There are millions of facts all pointing in the same direction and no facts pointing in the wrong direction.
Richard DawkinsWe 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 HamIn microbiology the roles of mutation and selection in evolution are coming to be better understood through the use of bacterial cultures of mutant strains.
Edward Lawrie TatumIt's playing with the idea of what musicians wear when they play live, especially focusing on the evolution of what a musician wears when they first start their career, when they are young and wild, to how they dress when they become famous and more polished.
Renzo RossoTransformation of language through psychedelic drugs is a central factor of the evolution of the social matrix of the rest of the century.
Terence McKennaProtecting our future on this planet depends on the conscious evolution of our species.
Leonardo DiCaprioIf we maintain the open-mindedness of children, we challenge fixed ideas and established structures, including our own. We listen to people in other denominations and religions. We don't find demons in those with whom we disagree. We don't cozy up to people who mouth our jargon. If we are open, we rarely resort to either-or: either creation or evolution, liberty or law, sacred or secular, Beethoven or Madonna. We focus on both-and, fully aware that God's truth cannot be imprisoned in a small definition.
Brennan ManningLove is a sacred reserve of energy; it is like the blood of spiritual evolution.
Pierre Teilhard de ChardinWe know evolution happened not because of transitional fossils such as A. natans but because of the convergence of evidence from such diverse fields as geology, paleontology, biogeography, comparative anatomy and physiology, molecular biology, genetics, and many more.
Michael ShermerIt is failure that guides evolution; perfection provides no incentive for improvement, and nothing is perfect.
Colson WhiteheadWe have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose.
Carl SaganBecause of the hegemony of fundamentalist religion in the United States, this country has been among the most resistant to the fact of human evolution.
Jerry A. CoyneAt this early stage in our evolution, now through our infancy and into our childhood and then, with luck, our growing up, what our species needs most of all, right now, is simply a future.
Lewis ThomasNo matter how numerous they may be, mutations do not produce any kind of evolution.
Pierre-Paul GrasseTo 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.
D. James KennedyAs 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.
Herbie MannThe intellectual evolution of the race consists in an increase in the number, delicacy, complexity, permanence and speed of formation of such associations.
Edward Thorndike