Theodosius Dobzhansky Quotes

#1. Nature's stern discipline enjoins mutual help at least as often as warfare. The fittest may also be the gentlest.

Theodosius Dobzhansky

#2. An accident, a random change, in any delicate mechanism can hardly be expected to improve it. Poking a stick into the machinery of one's watch or one's radio set will seldom make it work better.

Theodosius Dobzhansky

#3. There is no doubt that human survival will continue to depend more and more on human intellect and technology. It is idle to argue whether this is good or bad. The point of no return was passed long ago, before anyone knew it was happening.

Theodosius Dobzhansky

#4. Marxists are more right than wrong when they argue that the problems scientists take up,. the way they go about solving them, and even the solutions they arc inclined to accept, arc conditioned by the intellectual, social, and economic environments in which they live and work.

Theodosius Dobzhansky

#5. The living world is not a single array ... connected by unbroken series of intergrades.

Theodosius Dobzhansky

#6. Pat answers to complex problems are the hallmark of intellectual mediocrity

Theodosius Dobzhansky

#7. Evolutionary plasticity can be purchased only at the ruthlessly dear price of continuously sacrificing some individuals to death from unfavourable mutations. Bemoaning this imperfection of nature has, however, no place in a scientific treatment of this subject.

Theodosius Dobzhansky

#8. Scientists often have a naive faith that if only they could discover enough facts about a problem, these facts would somehow arrange themselves in a compelling and true solution.

Theodosius Dobzhansky

#9. Man is the only living being who has a developed self-awareness and death-awareness.

Theodosius Dobzhansky

#10. The more we know, the better we realize that our knowledge is a little island in the midst of an ocean of ignorance.

Theodosius Dobzhansky

#11. Natural selection must be replaced by eugenical artificial selection. This idea constitutes the sound core of eugenics, the applied science of human betterment.

Theodosius Dobzhansky

#12. 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.

Theodosius Dobzhansky

#13. I am a creationist and an evolutionist. Evolution is God's, or Nature's method of creation. Creation is not an event that happened in 4004 BC; it is a process that began some 10 billion years ago and is still under way.

Theodosius Dobzhansky

#14. No known human group ... simply throw out its dead without any ritual or ceremony. In stark contrast, no animal practices burial of dead individuals of its own species.

Theodosius Dobzhansky

#15. Evolution as a process that has always gone on in the history of the earth can only be doubted by those who are ignorant of the evidence or are resistant to evidence, owing to emotional blocks or plain bigotry.

Theodosius Dobzhansky

#16. No evidence is powerful enough to force acceptance of a conclusion that is emotionally distasteful.

Theodosius Dobzhansky