Biology Evolution Quotes

#1. As 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 Cronin

#2. Evolution is an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion during which the matter passes from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a definite coherent heterogeneity, and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation.

Herbert Spencer

#3. No existing form of anthropoid ape is even remotely related to the stock which has given rise to man.

Henry Fairfield Osborn

#4. 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

#5. It is my belief that the basic knowledge that we're providing to the world will have a profound impact on the human condition and the treatments for disease and our view of our place on the biological continuum.

J. Craig Venter

#6. Teaching students the evidence for and against Darwinism is not the same as teaching intelligent design. The U.S. Congress has officially endorsed teaching students 'the full range of scientific views' about Darwinian evolution.

Jonathan Wells

#7. All life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities

Richard Dawkins

#8. Our task now is to resynthesize biology; put the organism back into its environment; connect it again to its evolutionary past; and let us feel that complex flow that is organism, evolution, and environment united. The time has come for biology to enter the nonlinear world.

Carl Woese

#9. Considering the way the prebiotic soup is referred to in so many discussions of the origin of life as an already established reality, it comes as something of a shock to realize that there is absolutely no positive evidence for its existence.

Michael Denton

#10. The expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient.

Charles Darwin

#11. Evolution, cell biology, biochemistry, and developmental biology have made extraordinary progress in the last hundred years - much of it since I was weaned on schoolboy biology in the 1930s. Most striking of all is the sudden eruption of molecular biology starting in the 1950s.

John Tyler Bonner

#12. Animals have genes for altruism, and those genes have been selected in the evolution of many creatures because of the advantage they confer for the continuing survival of the species.

Lewis Thomas

#13. Evolution is the cornerstone of modern biology. Intelligent design is not a scientific concept.

John Marburger

#14. Whether conservative or liberal, fundamentalist or agnostic, the more students learn of biology, the more they accept evolution.

Kenneth R. Miller

#15. Evolution on the large scale unfolds, like much of human history, as a succession of dynasties.

Edmund Beecher Wilson

#16. The myosin in our own skeletal muscles is more closely related to the myosin driving the flight muscles of that irritating housefly buzzing around your head than it is to the myosin in the muscles of your own sphincters

Nick Lane

#17. Evolution makes biology make sense. And if you don't teach your students the evolutionary core of biology, you're making it harder for them.

Eugenie Scott

#18. If the history-deniers who doubt the fact of evolution are ignorant of biology, those who think the world began less than ten thousand years ago are worst than ignorant, they are the deluded to the point of perversity.

Richard Dawkins

#19. As a general rule, biology tends to be conservative. It's rare that evolution 'invents' the same process several times.

Gero Miesenbock

#20. This view, as a rounded whole and in all its essential elements, has very recently disappeared from science. It died a royal death with Agassiz.
[It had formerly been held that there were no genetic connections among species.]

Asa Gray

#21. It takes not a few centuries, or even millenniums, but millions of years for a subtle evolutionary change to become noticeable.

Abhijit Naskar

#22. It will explore the consequences of the evolution theory for a particular issue. My purpose is to examine the biology of selfishness and altruism. Apart

Richard Dawkins

#23. 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.'

Daniel Dennett

#24. The secrets of evolution are death and time - the deaths of enormous numbers of lifeforms that were imperfectly adapted to the environment; and time for a long succession of small mutations.

Carl Sagan

#25. he published a manifesto with a title Darwinists have been quoting ever since: "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution."78

Tom Wolfe

#26. According to the concept of transformational evolution, first clearly articulated by Lamarck, evolution consists of the gradual transformation of organisms from one condition of existence to another.

Ernst W. Mayr

#27. Fifty years from now if an understanding of man's origins, his evolution, his history, his progress is not in the common place of the school books we shall not exist.

Jacob Bronowski

#28. For in disease the most voluntary or most special movements, faculties, etc., suffer first and most, that is in an order the exact opposite of evolution. Therefore I call this the principle of Dissolution.

John Hughlings Jackson

#29. If a single cell, under appropriate conditions, becomes a man in the space of a few years, there can surely be no difficulty in understanding how, under appropriate conditions, a cell may, in the course of untold millions of years, give origin to the human race.

Herbert Spencer

#30. This survival of the fittest which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr. Darwin has called 'natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.

Herbert Spencer

#31. This survival of the fittest implies multiplication of the fittest.

{The phrase 'survival of the fittest' was not originated by Charles Darwin, though he discussed Spencer's 'excellent expression' in a letter to Alfred Russel Wallace (Jul 1866).}

Herbert Spencer

#32. All social animals, including people, live under constant pressure from two competing interests: protecting themselves from others and aligning themselves with others. When these two interests are balanced, the result is dynamic social homeostasis.

Mystery

#33. An irrefutable proof that such single-celled primaeval animals really existed as the direct ancestors of Man, is furnished according to the fundamental law of biogeny by the fact that the human egg is nothing more than a simple cell.

Ernst Haeckel

#34. Information and complexity go hand in hand.

Lee Spetner

#35. Darwin was a biological evolutionist, because he was first a uniformitarian geologist. Biology is pre-eminent to-day among the natural sciences, because its younger sister, Geology, gave it the means.

Charles Lapworth

#36. This new consensus seemed so compelling that Ernst Mayr, the dean of modern Darwinians, opened the ashcan of history for a deposit of Geoffrey's ideas about anatomical unity.

Stephen Jay Gould

#37. The evolution of sex is the hardest problem in evolutionary biology.

John Maynard Smith

#38. Homosexuality is neither a sin, nor an anomaly or a disease. It is an evolutionary variation.

Abhijit Naskar

#39. A grand and almost untrodden field of inquiry will be opened, on the causes and laws of variation, on correlation of growth, on the effects of use and disuse, on the direct actions of external conditions, and so forth.

Charles Darwin

#40. Even when Darwin's teaching first made its appearance, it became clear at once that its scientific, materialist core, its teaching concerning the evolution of living nature, was antagonistic to the idealism that reigned in biology.

Trofim Lysenko

#41. The evidence for evolution pours in, not only from geology, paleontology, biogeography, and anatomy, but of course from molecular biology and every other branch of the life sciences.

Daniel Dennett

#42. Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection determined the evolution of cultures in the same manner as it did that of species.

Konrad Lorenz

#43. In fact, biology is chaos. Biological systems are the product not of logic but of evolution, an inelegant process. Life does not choose the logically best design to meet a new situation. It adapts what already exists...The result, unlike the clean straight lines of logic, is often irregular, messy.

John M Barry

#44. A totally blind process can by definition lead to anything; it can even lead to vision itself.

Jacques Monod

#45. Teilhard merely seems to set the problem of man, as the utopian sees it, on lofty heights; yet, hi terminology, which mixes archeology, sociology, biology, astronomy, and a vulgarized theology, can, in fact, be translated at every turn into the language of collectivism and of totalitarian polices.

Thomas Molnar

#46. In 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 Tatum

#47. The complex organic device that creates and thereafter drives consciousness, is the human brain. Consciousness evolved hand in hand with the evolution of the human brain throughout a time span of six million years.

Abhijit Naskar

#48. I personally cannot discern a shred of evidence for '[intelligent] design.' If 97% of all creatures have gone extinct, some plan isn't working very well!

Irven Devore

#49. Indeed, not all attacks - especially the bitter and ridiculing kind leveled at Darwin - are offered in good faith, but for practical purposes it is good policy to assume that they are.

Hans Selye

#50. Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose objections are based not on reasoning but on doctrinaire adherence to religious principles.

James D. Watson

#51. A grain in the balance will determine which individual shall live and which shall die - which variety or species shall increase in number, and which shall decrease, or finally become extinct.

Charles Darwin

#52. I am perhaps more proud of having helped to redeem the character of the cave-man than of any other single achievement of mine in the field of anthropology.

Henry Fairfield Osborn

#53. A century ago, people laughed at the notion that we were descended from monkeys. Today, the individuals most offended by that claim are the monkeys.

Jacob M. Appel

#54. One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.

Charles Darwin

#55. There is nothing ideal in Nature, because it was not created by some sort of ideal Almighty Being with perfect peerless craftsmanship. Nature as it is, has evolved through millions of years out of the biological drive for survival.

Abhijit Naskar

#56. Evolution is the fundamental idea in all of life science - in all of biology.

Bill Nye

#57. Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability.

Ronald A. Fisher

#58. The question of the position of man, as an animal, has given rise to much disputation, with the result of proving that there is no anatomical or developmental character by which he is more widely distinguished from the group of animals most nearly allied to him, than they are from one another.

Thomas Henry Huxley

#59. If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.

Charles Darwin

#60. It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself.

Rachel Carson

#61. I think that local school districts - not the federal government - should make the decision about how they teach science, biology, economics. I want my kids to be taught about evolution; I want my kids to be taught about other theories.

Bobby Jindal

#62. We can truly see that consciousness is operating creatively even in biology, even in the evolution of species.

Amit Goswami

#63. The embryological record is almost always abbreviated in accordance with the tendency of nature (to be explained on the principle of survival of the fittest) to attain her needs by the easiest means.

Francis Maitland Balfour

#64. Biology is far from understanding exactly how a single cell develops into a baby, but research suggests that human development can ultimately be explained in terms of biochemistry and molecular biology. Most scientists would make a similar statement about evolution.

Kenneth R. Miller

#65. The platypus, as it turns out, derives its DNA from a menagerie of creatures. When its genome was fully decoded, it was found only to be 80% mammalian, and had genes found previously only in reptilian, bird, amphibian, and fish DNA.

B.C. Chase

#66. That natural selection can produce changes within a type is disputed by no one, not even the staunchest creationist. But that it can transform one species into another - that, in fact, has never been observed.

Robert J. Sawyer

#67. The complexity of the simplest known type of cell is so great that it is impossible to accept that such an object could have been thrown together suddenly by some kind of freakish, vastly improbable, event. Such an occurrence would be indistinguishable from a miracle.

Michael Denton

#68. Permanence of instinct must go with permanence of form ... The history of the present must teach us the history of the past.
[Referring to studying fossil remains of the weevil, largely unchanged to the present day.]

Jean-Henri Fabre

#69. All of today's DNA, strung through all the cells of the earth, is simply an extension and elaboration of [the] first molecule.

Lewis Thomas

#70. I furnished the body that was needed to sit in the defendant's chair.
[Explaining his role in the Scopes Monkey Trial.]

John T. Scopes

#71. Neither humans nor the Gods that they have created are superior to old Mother Nature.

Abhijit Naskar

#72. You can't even begin to understand biology, you can't understand life, unless you understand what it's all there for, how it arose - and that means evolution.

Richard Dawkins

#73. If a sect does officially insist that its structure of belief demands that evolution be false, then no compromise is possible. An honest and competent biology teacher can only conclude that the sect's beliefs are wrong and that its religion is a false one.

George Gaylord Simpson

#74. Each species may have had its origin in a single pair, or individual, where an individual was sufficient, and species may have been created in succession at such times and in such places as to enable them to multiply and endure for an appointed period, and occupy an appointed space on the globe.

Charles Lyell

#75. It is difficult to believe in the dreadful but quiet war lurking just below the serene facade of nature.

Charles Darwin

#76. It is not always the magnitude of the differences observed between species that must determine specific distinctions, but the constant preservation of those differences in reproduction.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

#77. Stephen Hawking said that his quest is simply "trying to understand the mind of God".

Stephen Hawking

#78. It requires a deliberate mental effort to turn biology the right way up again, and remind ourselves that the replicators come first, in importance as well as in history.

Richard Dawkins

#79. Homosexuality is nature's way of keeping the population in check.

Abhijit Naskar

#80. The idea that one can go to the fossil record and expect to empirically recover an ancestor-descendant sequence, be it of species, genera, families, or whatever, has been, and continues to be, a pernicious illusion.

Gareth J. Nelson

#81. Evolutionarily speaking, love is all about procreation.

Abhijit Naskar

#82. Objectivity cannot be equated with mental blankness; rather, objectivity resides in recognizing your preferences and then subjecting them to especially harsh scrutiny - and also in a willingness to revise or abandon your theories when the tests fail (as they usually do).

Stephen Jay Gould

#83. Stop talking about "rape" and start talking about "sex", and within a few decades India will attain the true mindset to prevent sexual assaults.

Abhijit Naskar

#84. I was aware of Darwin's views fourteen years before I adopted them and I have done so solely and entirely from an independent study of the plants themselves.
[Letter to W.H. Harvey]

Joseph Dalton Hooker

#85. My degree is in biology, and it will always be my first love. Evolution, ecology, genetics - they were the textbooks I was devouring as a teenager, and it was there that my love of science grew.

Elise Andrew

#86. Evolution, 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 W. Mayr

#87. No human, no matter how ancient, or how popular, can be above the laws of Nature.

Abhijit Naskar

#88. The evolution of higher and of lower forms of life is as well and as soundly established as the eternal hills. It has long since ceased to be a theory; it is a law of Nature as universal in living things as is the law of gravitation in material things and in the motions of the heavenly spheres.

Henry Fairfield Osborn

#89. Biology without selfishness, is nothing but fiction.

Abhijit Naskar

#90. We 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 Shermer

#91. We find all kinds of species that have taken up a second chromosome or a third one from somewhere, adding thousands of new traits in a second to that species. So, people who think of evolution as just one gene changing at a time have missed much of biology.

Craig Venter

#92. If you look at the evolution of the brain, the logic centers, they were growing at the same time as the creative centers were expanding. And that creates this really potent illusion that you're not just a bag of chemicals reacting to shit. Which is what you are.

Tim Cannon

#93. The occurrence of successive forms of life upon our globe is an historical fact, which cannot be disputed; and the relation of these successive forms, as stages of evolution of the same type, is established in various cases.

Thomas Henry Huxley

#94. This week, Georgia's board of education approved a plan that allows teachers to keep using the word Evolution when teaching biology. Though, as a compromise, dinosaurs are now called Jesus Horses.

Jimmy Fallon

#95. Life is chemistry, not biology.

Joey Lawsin

#96. The ideology and philosophy of neo-Darwinism which is sold by its adepts as a scientific theoretical foundation of biology seriously hampers the development of science and hides from students the field's real problems.

Vladimir L. Voeikov

#97. I don't believe any scientific field to be superior to another.

Abhijit Naskar

#98. Our present intricate humanly consciousness evolved after a long journey of struggle. And the beauty of natural selection is that our struggle against nature made us worthy of being rewarded with the 3 lbs. lump of highly advanced biological computer by our Mother Nature herself.

Abhijit Naskar

#99. Faith is a natural evolutionary trait of the human mind, selected by Mother Nature as an internal coping-mechanism.

Abhijit Naskar

#100. The big news in biology this week was the announcement that we've stopped evolving, in the biological sense. I'll buy that. Technology has stopped us, and technology will take us on, into a new evolution, one Mr. Bush never dreamed of, and neither, I'm sure, have I.

William Gibson