Quotes About Evolution

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.

We see not only thought as participating in evolution as an anomaly or as an epiphenomenon; but evolution as so reducible to and identifiable with a progress towards thought that the movement of our souls expresses and measures the very stages of progress of evolution itself. Man discovers that he is nothing else than evolution become conscious of itself.

Personal evolution has nothing to do with art, it's never. Art is a sine curve: dark and light change permanently, in cumulative radicalism. Art decides what to do. The choice of colors is made by the colors themselves. The evolution of art is the evolution of the future itself.

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?

Evolution could so easily be disproved if just a single fossil turned up in the wrong date order. Evolution has passed this test with flying colours.

We do not draw conclusions with our eyes, but with our reasoning powers, and if the whole of the rest of living nature proclaims with one accord from all sides the evolution of the world of organisms, we cannot assume that the process stopped short of Man. But it follows also that the factors which brought about the development of Man from his Simian ancestry must be the same as those which have brought about the whole of 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.

Holland's and Kauffman's work, together with Dawkins' simulations of evolution and Varela's models of autopoietic systems, provide essential inspiration for the new discipline of artificial life, This approach, initiated by Chris Langton (1989, 1992), tries to develop technological systems (computer programs and autonomous robots) that exhibit lifelike properties, such as reproduction, sexuality, swarming, and co-evolution.

I 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.

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.

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.

Neo-Darwinian language and conceptual structure itself ensures scientific failure: Major questions posed by zoologists cannot be answered from inside the neo-Darwinian straitjacket. Such questions include, for example, 'How do new structures arise in evolution?' 'Why, given so much environmental change, is stasis so prevalent in evolution as seen in the fossil record?' 'How did one group of organisms or set of macromolecules evolve from another?' The importance of these questions is not at issue; it is just that neo-Darwinians, restricted by their resuppositions, cannot answer them.

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.

We 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.

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.

Accepting evolution does not force us to jettison our morals and ethics, and rejecting evolution does not ensure their constancy.

Success is not in obtaining the thing. Because there's always another thing. And then you look back on it, and for me, through my evolution, yes I have success by most measures - but for me, when it comes to the greatest joy of reward, there's an emotional element and there's an intellectual element. Emotionally, my greatest joy was the personal relationships I've had. That was the greatest joy. Intellectually, my satisfaction was that I do feel I've evolved well and I'm doing my best to contribute toward evolution.

Human nature, as manifested in tribalism and nationalism, provides the momentum of the machinery of human evolution.

When you're fighting for civil rights, it's sometimes two steps forward and one step back. Civil rights are an evolution; and you have to bring people along.

Tick is a cartoon character, I don't know if you're familiar with him. This is the third step in his evolution. Comic book to cartoon to, now, live-action.

Seen in the light of evolution, biology is, perhaps, intellectually the most satisfying and inspiring science. Without that light it becomes a pile of sundry facts -- some of them interesting or curious but making no meaningful picture as a whole.

It is important to understand that while oxytocin may be the hub of the evolution of the social brain in mammals, it is part of a very complex system. Part of what it does is act in opposition to stress hormones, and in that sense release of oxytocin feels good - as stress hormones and anxiety do not feel good.

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.

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.

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

A close inspection discovers an empirical impossibility to be inherent in the idea of evolution.

A million years of evolution, Eric said bitterly, and what are we? Animals.

William Henry Flower the Anglican too praised evolution as a cleansing solvent, dissolving the dross which had 'encrusted' Christianity 'in the days of ignorance and superstition'.

We 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.

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.

[Evolution Theory] is the motivating factor for guys like Hitler and Stalin and George Bush, by the way, who is a Satan worshipper, like we don't know that.

Wherever there is a design that is highly successful in a broad range of similar environments, it is apt to emerge again and again, independently - the phenomenon known in biology as convergent evolution. I call these designs 'good tricks.'

Evolution isn't true, because if we evolved from monkeys, how can they still be here?

The old must pass away. It has served its purpose in the cycles of evolution and must now make way for a new, more expanded and more fruitful manifestation.

I find it far more awesome, wonderful, that creation; our appearance in the world; should be the culmination, or at least one of the latest products of 3,000 Million years of organic evolution, than a kind of country trick, taking a rib out of a man's side in a trance.

We can choose this moment of crisis to ask and answer the big questions of society's evolution — like, what do we want to be when we grow up?

What's popularly known as the evolution of consciousness, in other words that the expansion of cognitive repertoire that occurs in human beings, which has always been a great puzzle to evolutionary theory, I believe, occurred in the presence of a kind of catalyst for the human imagination.

Evolution is just a theory? Well, so is gravity and I don't see you jumping out of buildings.

As far as I can see, our concentration of different abilities in one species - there's nothing I can see that in this Darwinian evolution that could've done that. So it seems to be a miracle of some sort.

Yoga is an interior penetration leading to integration of being, senses, breath, mind, intelligence, consciousness, and Self. It is definitely an inward journey, evolution through involution, toward the Soul, which in turn desires to emerge and embrace you in its glory.

Dawkins asserts that final causes and design don't really exist. Unguided evolution explains it all. Francis Crick thought the same thing but was afraid people would be misled by what they actually saw. So he issued this warning: "Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved." What? A warning to ignore the obvious? Absolutely. Because if we don't ignore the obvious, we might be tempted to follow common sense and attribute the "appearance" of design to actual design.

With an absurd oversimplification, the 'invention' of the calculus is sometimes ascribed to two men, Newton and Leibniz. In reality, the calculus is the product of a long evolution that was neither initiated nor terminated by Newton and Leibniz, but in which both played a decisive part.

Irreducible complexity is a problem for Darwinian evolution. Whenever we see these complex functional systems we realise that they have to be designed.

Anytime that knowledge and a version of the truth are considered to be absolute, fundamentalism is the result, whether the arena is Christianity, Islam, Judaism, or any other religious faith, as well as atheism, conservative or liberal political views, even evolution or intelligent design. Anytime our minds are closed and there is no room for dissent, we are on a slippery slope towards stagnation.

The history of totalitarian regimes is reflected in the evolution and perfection of the instruments of terror and more especially the police.

The course of evolution is to a greater integration of similarly functioning ganglia.

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.

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.