Top 100 Darwinian Quotes
#1. Modernist architecture and town planning is inimical to human beings ... based on the Darwinian concept that evolution is open ended, that there must always be something new and better.
Leon Krier
#2. If we, as a species, are the ultimate product of Darwinian selection, then so, too, is this incredible disease that lurks inside us.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#3. Faith has its price. When misfortune strikes the true believer, he assumes he has done something to deserve punishment, but isn't quite certain what. The realist, recognizing that he lives in a Darwinian universe, is simply grateful to have made it to another sunset.
Jack McDevitt
#4. Throughout the past century there has always existed a significant minority of first-rate biologists who have never been able to bring themselves to accept the validity of Darwinian claims. In fact, the number of biologists who have expressed some degree of disillusionment is practically endless.
Michael Denton
#5. It seems that's there a ghastly Darwinian principle of economics known as the Law of Substitution which declares, more or less, that "the cheapest will survive". This has all sorts of unpleasant consequences, one of which is that non-economic values tend to be eliminated.
J.G. Farrell
#6. Being quite a Darwinian creature feature I have to add, that only the fittest of survival will finish this book anyway,
Steve Merrick
#7. Capitalism, gaudy and greedy, has been inherent in western aesthetics from ancient Egypt on. It is the mysticism and glamour of things , which take on a personality of their own. As an economic system, it is in the Darwinian line of Sade, not Rousseau.
Camille Paglia
#8. We have enforced a Darwinian process on wolves, turning them into the shy and elusive animals they've become. They didn't have that fear of us 30,000 years ago. We didn't have gunpowder; we had rocks. Wolves would have seen us as lunch, and we were weak and slow and tasty.
Bruce Cameron
#9. The advent of postmodernism, the enshrinement of Darwinian orthodoxy in the educational systems of Western society, and the rise of blatant humanism as the religion-by-default of large subcultures have brought no end of new challenges to biblical sufficiency.
James R. White
#10. In the Darwinian world, self-preservation is the ultimate shiny good.
N.D. Wilson
#11. He sketches a world of Darwinian struggle where all the savages wear three-piece suits.
Stephen King
#12. It is disturbing to discover in oneself these curious revelations of the validity of the Darwinian theory. If it is true that we have sprung from the ape, there are occasions when my own spring appears not to have been very far.
Cornelia Otis Skinner
#13. (P58) It is curious how, with his stark Darwinian outlook, his elevation of war to the central place in human history, and his racism, as well as his fixation on "great leaders," Churchill's worldview resembled that of his antagonist, Hitler.
Ralph Raico
#14. Darwinian natural selection only yields adaptation to changing local environments, and better function in an immediate habitat might just as well be achieved by greater simplicity in form and behavior as by ever-increasing complexity.
Stephen Jay Gould
#15. The greatest impact of the Darwinian revolution...was that it completed the liberation from superstition and fear that began in the physical sciences a few centuries before. Man, too, is a natural phenomenon. [in "The evolutionary concept of man", 1972, p. 35.]
George Gaylord Simpson
#16. The great thing about the business is how Darwinian it is. We have to swim or die - if you are found wanting over a period of time, you've either got to change what you're doing or find something else to do.
Steven Soderbergh
#17. In the vast game of Darwinian musical chairs, whenever the music stopped there were large numbers of people without a seat - and some smartass had sold them guns.
Daniel Suarez
#18. I mean it's the most objective industry in the world. If your numbers stink, you're out. If your numbers are good, you get more money. It's the most Darwinian, it's beautiful, it's brutal, it works.
Jim Cramer
#19. The only ideological or political factions that have made any attempt at an ethics consistent with Darwinian science, to this point at least, have been the socialist eugenics movement of the early twentieth century and the Nazi movement that sprang from it. Obviously,
David Bentley Hart
#20. If death weren't around to 'finalize' the Darwinian process, we'd all still be amoebas.
P. J. O'Rourke
#21. Be happy to, I said, cringing to hear such a dumb, folksy locution escape my lips, then launched into my well-rehearsed precis. The fact that humankind now finds itself in a post-Darwinian epistemological condition, I explained, need not trouble us from an ethical perspective.
James K. Morrow
#22. The modern theory of evolution does not require gradual change. It in fact, the operation of Darwinian processes should yield exactly what we see in the fossil record. It is gradualism that we must reject, not Darwinism.
Stephen Jay Gould
#23. The right question to ask from a Darwinian prospective is what was it about bipedalism that was so advantageous? Why did it lead to a - why did that adaptation ultimately lead to a species Homo sapiens that has come to dominate the planet today with six and a half billion people?
Donald Johanson
#24. A Darwinian nation of economic fitness abhors idleness, dependence, non-productivity.
Simone De Beauvoir
#25. The idea that being human and having rights are equivalent - that rights are inherent - is unintelligible in a Darwinian world.
Tom Stoppard
#26. My own field of paleontology has strongly challenged the Darwinian premise that life's major transformations can be explained by adding up, through the immensity of geological time, the successive tiny changes produced generation after generation by natural selection.
Stephen Jay Gould
#27. I came to realise that Darwinian evolution had no explanation of me as an experiencing self.
John Eccles
#28. These were "fossil behaviors," Darwinian vestiges of earlier times brought out of physiological limbo by the stimulation of primitive brain-stem systems, damaged and sensitized by the encephalitis in the first place, and now "awakened" by L-dopa.1 I
Oliver Sacks
#29. There's a misconception that survival of the fittest means survival of the most aggressive. The adjective 'Darwinian' used to refer to ruthless competition; you used to read that in business journals. But that's not what Darwinian means to a biologist; it's whatever leads to reproductive success.
Steven Pinker
#30. Humans are just a very, very small part of the panoply of life, and it is arguable that in a certain sense, humans have emancipated themselves from Darwinian selection.
Richard Dawkins
#31. We're trying to run a 21st century society and economy with 19th century Darwinian, competitive, crude ideas.
Susan George
#32. Humanity is experiencing an extraordinary burst of evolutionary change, driven by good old-fashioned Darwinian natural selection. But it is selection among ideas, not among genes.
Matt Ridley
#33. The Darwinian theory is in principle capable of explaining life. No other theory that has ever been suggested is in principle capable of explaining life.
Richard Dawkins
#34. When the theory of evolution destroyed the picture of God as the supreme Creator, confidence in God as the all-powerful Father of man fell with it, although many were able to combine a belief in God with the acceptance of the Darwinian theory.
Erich Fromm
#35. Stinginess seemed instinctive to him. Darwinian even. He hadn't gotten to his current size by sharing.
Laura Lippman
#36. Darwinian evolution is unscientific, unobservable, unbelievable, but understandable in a world that hates God.
Ray Comfort
#37. [Evolution] doesn't mean God-guided, gradual creation. It means unguided, purposeless change. The Darwinian theory doesn't say that God created slowly. It says that naturalistic evolution is the creator, and so God had nothing to do with it.
Philip Johnson
#38. I think that what one can see from a Darwinian account is how the addition of culture in our species turns us into a very special sort of animal, an animal that can be a moral agent in a way that no other animal can be.
Daniel Dennett
#39. I wondered what the value was, in the Darwinian sense, of making fast friends like that. There must be some scientific significance to being a follower, to allowing yourself to be persuaded by personality
Hilary Thayer Hamann
#40. There are no detailed Darwinian accounts for the evolution of any fundamental biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations
[Article : "In the Details . . . What?"]
James A. Shapiro
#41. Among German historians, there's really not much debate about whether or not Hitler was a social Darwinist. He clearly was drawing on Darwinian ideas.
Richard Weikart
#42. 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.
Michael Denton
#43. Programs to demonstrate Darwinian evolution are akin to a pinball machine. The steel ball bounces around differently every time but eventually falls down the little hole behind the flippers.
Robert J. Marks II
#44. Journalism justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the vulgarist.
Oscar Wilde
#45. Call it the Darwinian contradiction. We come down from the trees and walk upright and what do we get for it? Foot pain! Bad backs! We cease living sexual lives regulated by mating seasons, by hormonal tides or the rotation of the earth and what happens? Marital misery. Divorce. Rape.
Jonathan Rosen
#46. As for modern journalism, it is not my business to defend it. It justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the vulgarest.
Oscar Wilde
#47. The packaged food business environment is very Darwinian. You're fighting for survival every year; you evolve and grow or you die. It's really that simple.
Douglas Conant
#48. Darwinian evolution has obviously not had enough time to work.
George Hammond
#49. I suppose I'd characterize myself as having a faith-based optimism. My faith is parental and Darwinian.
Denis Hayes
#50. I could easily believe that religion could enhance health and hence survival, and that therefore there could be indeed be literally Darwinian survival value, Darwinian selection in favor of religion. None of that of course bears at all upon the truth value of the claims made by religions.
Richard Dawkins
#51. We should not live by Darwinian principles. But Darwin explains how we got here.
Richard Dawkins
#52. Thermodynamics, correctly interpreted, does not just allow Darwinian evolution; it favors it.
Ludwig Boltzmann
#53. The monopoly of science in the realm of knowledge explains why evolutionary biologists do not find it meaningful to address the question whether the Darwinian theory is true.
Phillip E. Johnson
#54. If you take a more Darwinian point of view the dynamics of the universe are such that as the universe evolved in time, complex systems arose out of the natural dynamics of the universe.
Seth Lloyd
#55. Unhappy endings are just as important as happy endings. They're an efficient way of transmitting vital Darwinian information. Your brain needs them to make maps of the world, maps that let you know what sorts of people and situations to avoid.
Douglas Coupland
#56. Intelligent design cannot explain Darwinian evolution. Darwin's whole point is that variation and change are random and without higher purpose. We cannot imagine that God designed this disproof of His own existence.
James K. Galbraith
#57. Evolutionary biologists have been able to pretend to know how complex biological systems originated only because they treated them as black boxes. Now that biochemists have opened the black boxes and seen what is inside, they know the Darwinian theory is just a story, not a scientific explanation.
Phillip E. Johnson
#58. A mischievous biologist might wonder whether some other physicists are in need of Darwinian consciousness-raising.
Richard Dawkins
#59. The Darwinian concept of the survival of the fittest has been substituted by a philosophy of the survival of the slickest.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#60. I am an enthusiastic Darwinian, but I think Darwinism is too big a theory to be confined to the narrow context of the gene.
Richard Dawkins
#61. 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
#62. I mean, in a way, I feel that one of the reasons for learning about Darwinian evolution is as an object lesson in how not to set up our values and social lives.
Richard Dawkins
#63. The Darwinian adaptive trait of our time is the ability to figure out when we are being lied to on television.
Dick Morris
#64. Keep Darwinian thinking out of cosmology, out of psychology, out of human culture, out of ethics, politics, and religion!
Daniel Dennett
#65. The newly released movie 'Noah' features a retelling of the creation story that clearly depicts Darwinian evolution transforming a single-cell organism into a monkey. The movie also seems to show magic in scenes more reminiscent of the occult than of the Bible story.
Aaron Klein
#66. Creativity can only be anarchic, capitalist, Darwinian.
Umberto Eco
#67. I think many people are terribly afraid of being demoted by the Darwinian scheme from the role of authors and creators in their own right into being just places where things happen in the universe.
Daniel Dennett
#69. Possibly none at all: it's a fallacy to assume that whatever is is that way for a good Darwinian reason. Just because a desire or practice is widespread or universal doesn't necessarily mean it confers an evolutionary edge.
Michael Pollan
#70. If you take Darwinian theory, make a 'scientific' principle out of it, put it into political action, then you have something like Nazi Germany.
Bruce Lipton
#71. Humans are just barely intelligent tool users; Darwinian evolutionary selection stopped when language and tool use converged, leaving the average hairy meme carrier sadly deficient in smarts.
Charles Stross
#72. 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
#73. From a Darwinian perspective, it is clear what pain is doing. It's a warning: 'Don't do that again.' If you burn yourself, you're never going to pick up a live coal again.
Richard Dawkins
#74. Technology is Darwinian. It spreads. It evolves. It adapts. The most dangerous wipes out the less fit.
Nancy Kress
#75. There's almost a Darwinian quality about the NFL.
Steve Fainaru
#76. Evolutionary psychologists seem to want to unmask our noblest motives as ultimately self-interested - to show that our love for children, compassion for the unfortunate and sense of justice are just tactics in a Darwinian struggle to perpetuate our genes.
Steven Pinker
#77. We have long been seeking a different kind of evolutionary process and have now found one; namely, the change within the pattern of the chromosomes ... The neo-Darwinian theory of the geneticists is no longer tenable.
Richard Goldschmidt
#79. The Darwinian revolution is about essence. The Darwinian revolution is about who we are, it's what we're made of, it's what our life means insofar as science can answer that question.
Stephen Jay Gould
#80. The funny thing is if in England, you ask a man in the street who the greatest living Darwinian is, he will say Richard Dawkins. And indeed, Dawkins has done a marvelous job of popularizing Darwinism. But Dawkins' basic theory of the gene being the object of evolution is totally non-Darwinian.
Ernst W. Mayr
#81. All men lie. That's how they operate. if you want a longterm relationship with a man you've got to understand it's going to be with a liar. It's in their nature - it's genetic, it's a bloody Darwinian acquired characteristic for survival, OK? They tell you what they want you to hear.
Peter James
#83. By the cold Darwinian logic of natural selection, evolution codifies happenstance into strategy.
David Quammen
#84. I have often said that I am a passionate Darwinian when it comes to explaining why we exist.
Richard Dawkins
#85. Our habits and our institutions, from language to cities, are constantly changing, and the mechanism of change turns out to be surprisingly Darwinian: it is gradual, undirected, mutational, inexorable, combinatorial, selective and in some vague sense progressive.
Matt Ridley
#86. It is difficult to imagine evolution in alien planets operating in any manner other than Darwinian.
Simon Conway Morris
#87. If you feel the purpose of life is struggle, Darwinian fitness, dog eat dog, then you will be eaten by a dog, or you will eat dog. You become what you focus on.
Frederick Lenz
#88. The human brain is built to compare; it's Darwinian to consider an alternative when one presents itself.
Helen Fisher
#89. The classics of Marxism, while fully appreciating the significance of the Darwinian theory, pointed out the errors of which Darwin was guilty. Darwin's theory, though unquestionably materialist in its main features, is not free from some serious errors.
Trofim Lysenko
#90. boys had been programmed by Darwinian selection to run around in the open chucking spears at wild animals - something
Neal Stephenson
#91. The stupendous time spans of the evolutionary past are now part of common culture (though maybe not in the United States Bible Belt, nor in parts of the Islamic world). Most people are at ease with the idea that our present biosphere is the outcome of four billion years of Darwinian evolution.
Martin Rees
#92. The Darwinian movement has made no difference to mankind, except that, instead of talking unphilosophically about philosophy, they now talk unscientifically about science.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#93. Surely the mitochondrion that first entered another cell was not thinking about the future benefits of cooperation and integration; it was merely trying to make its own living in a tough Darwinian world
Stephen Jay Gould
#94. Even if there were no actual evidence in favor of the Darwinian theory, we should still be justified in preferring it over all rival theories.
Richard Dawkins
#95. We accept that people are irrational for good Darwinian reasons. But I don't think we should be so pessimistic as to think that therefore we're forever condemned to be irrational.
Richard Dawkins
#96. No wonder the creationists don't believe the darwinian account.
Mark Pagel
#97. The fact - not theory - that evolution has occurred and the Darwinian theory as to how it occurred have become so confused in popular opinion that the distinction must be stressed.
George Gaylord Simpson
#98. Darwinian man, though well-behaved, at best is only a monkey shaved.
W.S. Gilbert
#99. There is an immediate payoff to intelligent design: it destroys the atheistic legacy of Darwinian evolution. Intelligent design makes it impossible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.
William A. Dembski
#100. The Far East and the Islamic world produced minds as intelligent and curious as those of Europe. However, between 1500 and 1950 they did not produce anything that comes even close to Newtonian physics or Darwinian biology.
Yuval Noah Harari
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