Darwin's Quotes

#1. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from apelike ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered.

Stephen Jay Gould

#2. Those who think 'Science is Measurement' should search Darwin's works for numbers and equations.

David H. Hubel

#3. Darwin's theory thus makes the testable prediction that whenever we use technology to glimpse reality beyond the human scale, our evolved intuition should break down.

Max Tegmark

#4. For all the creationists out there, Darwin's just an atheist. But he was actually agnostic.

Henry Ian Cusick

#5. Darwinism is not eugenics, but all eugenicists were devoted Darwinists, staring with Darwin's sons Leonard.

A.E. Samaan

#6. It is good to keep in mind ... that nobody has ever succeeded in producing even one new species by the accumulation of micromutations. Darwin's theory of natural selection has never had any proof, yet it has been universally accepted.

Richard Goldschmidt

#7. Anyone who writes about Darwin's theory of evolutionin the singular, without segregating the theories of gradual evolution, common descent, speciation, and the mechanism of natural selection, will be quite unable to discuss the subject competently.

Ernst Mayr

#8. A book that I rate only second in importance in evolution theory to Darwin 's Origin (this as joined with its supplement Of Man), and also rate as undoubtedly one of the greatest books of the twentieth century

Ronald Fisher

#9. Religions exist primarily for people to achieve together what they cannot achieve alone. - David Sloan Wilson, Darwin's Cathedral

Daniel C. Dennett

#10. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species, but the situation hasn't changed much ... We have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin's time.

David M. Raup

#11. In Darwin's time all of biology was a black box: not only the cell, or the eye, or digestion, or immunity, but every biological structure and function because, ultimately, no one could explain how biological processes occurred.

Michael Behe

#12. I had a friend who got pregnant at age 14 and wasn't quite sure who the father was.
Her paternity test went a little something like this: "If it comes out black, its Darwin's and if it comes out white its Ray's."
This is how things were done in the trailer park.

Kate Madison

#13. He tries not to think about The Core ... but he couldn't deny it ... they were all becoming something else entirely. Darwin's Children

Natasha Larry

#14. I'm saying that there were many great naturalists before Darwin's time who were very pious people and who knew more about nature than most of us. These were great naturalists; people I would admire for their knowledge of natural science given the time.

Greg Graffin

#15. Readers of Darwin's life, for instance, and particularly of the published correspondence of Darwin, are henceforth naturalists in the making. Ever afterwards they are Darwins on a small scale, seeing animals and plants in an entirely different light and with a correspondingly keener interest.

John Steeksma

#16. If I had to pick a hero, it would be Charles Darwin
the size of his mind, which included all that scientific curiosity and knowledge seeking, and the ability to put it all together. There is a genuine spirituality about Darwin's thinking.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#17. While Darwin's tear is a defense, and Freud's tear is a symptomatic eruption, Sartre's tear is a refusal.

Eugenie Brinkema

#18. At least since Darwin's day, we have known that all of us originally emerged from the sea. That fact may account for our abiding fascination with it, our longing to return there, whether to sail the main or merely contemplate its restless enormity.

J. D. McClatchy

#19. Charlotte felt a pity for her, because her world was changing, and she did not understand it; it had no place for her. She was like one of Mr. Darwin's dinosaurs, dangerous and ridiculous, beyond its time.

Anne Perry

#20. Charlie said, his voice rising an octave in desperation. "I know it's ridiculous, but I keep trying to rationalise everything and it's driving me crazy. Did you spot that flying horse earlier? I found myself trying to explain it with Darwin's Theory of Evolution.

Victor Kloss

#21. Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is the only workable explanation that has ever been proposed for the remarkable fact of our own existence, indeed the existence of all life wherever it may turn up in the universe.

John Maynard Smith

#22. 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

#23. The Galapagos Islands are probably the most famous wildlife-watching destination in the world. And no wonder - it's almost impossible to exaggerate the sheer spectacle of the place that provided inspiration for Charles Darwin's ground-breaking theory of natural selection.

Mark Carwardine

#24. There's a joke in everything, the trick is finding it. The best compliment a joke can get is what Huxley said about Darwin's theory of evolution - 'Why didn't I think of that?'

Emo Philips

#25. Religious reasons, which is no reason. I notice Skeptic had a review of Dennett's book, Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Religious reasons amount to what Dennett terms "skyhooks." Do you believe in skyhooks? I don't.

Garrett Hardin

#26. If you take Darwin's theory and extend it to its logical end, it can be used to justify a number of very horrendous things.

Kirk Cameron

#27. But sequence comparisons simply can't account for the development of complex biochemical systems any more than Darwin's comparison of simple and complex eyes told him how vision worked.

Michael Behe

#28. There is in fact a controversy over Darwin's theory. Clearly both theories have religious implications. But this is not about God.

Richard Thompson

#29. As the number of unexplained, irreducibly complex biological systems increases, our confidence that Darwin's criterion of failure has been met skyrockets toward the maximum that science allows.

Michael Behe

#30. Darwin's dice have rolled badly for Earth. The human species is, in a word, an environmental abnormality. Perhaps a law of evolution is that intelligence usually extinguishes itself.

E. O. Wilson

#31. Ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transitions than we had in Darwin's time.

David M. Raup

#32. 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

#33. At the heart of Darwin's theory,

Elizabeth Kolbert

#34. In my view all salvation for philosophy may be expected to come from Darwin's theory

Ludwig Boltzmann

#35. According to Darwin's theory, it's not the strongest who survive, but those who are the best adapted to their environment. Average people are the ones who survive and carry on the human race.

Svetlana Alexievich

#36. America's got a Darwin problem - and it matters. According to a 2009 Gallup poll taken on the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth, fewer than 40% of Americans are willing to say that they 'believe in evolution.'

Kenneth R. Miller

#37. To understand Darwin's work, you have to distinguish between his theory of descent and his theory of natural selection. THe full name of the first is the theory of descent with modification. Some call it the fact of evolution, and some call it the doctrine of evolution.

Lee Spetner

#38. I find that most people that zealously defend Darwin have not actually read Darwin; definitely not Darwin's second book, The Descent of Man.

A.E. Samaan

#39. In fact, Darwin's own grandfather anticipated the central tenet of Lamarckism by some seven years: "All animals undergo perpetual transformations; which are in part produced by their own exertions ... and many of these acquired forms or propensities are transmitted to their posterity."

Erasmus Darwin

#40. The first person to refer to Darwin's tales as Just So Stories was a Harvard paleontologist and evolutionist, Stephen Jay Gould, in 1978.61

Tom Wolfe

#41. With every passing year we discover more evidence to support Darwin's revolutionary hypothesis that the cognitive and emotional lives of animals differ only by degree, from the fishes to the birds to the monkeys to humans.

Roger Fouts

#42. In Darwin's theory, you just have to substitute 'mutations' for his 'slight accidental variations' (just as quantum theory substitutes 'quantum jump' for 'continuous transfer of energy'). In all other respects little change was necessary in Darwin's theory ...

Erwin Schrodinger

#43. Darwin's theory is as dead as he is. Everyone is surviving, fit or not. Years ago, any kid dumb enough to chase a shiny object down a well was dead, and out of the gene pool. Now they got the technology and medicine to save the fool so he can breed more open mouth breathers.

Lenny Bruce

#44. They want me to kill him because he didn't do well on their tests. This is a mismatch. I am Darwin's scythe. Nature scraping away the chaff.

Pierce Brown

#45. Evolution was Vladimir Ilich Lenin's problem. Lenin lead the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and took over Russia. He killed the Zar [ sic ] and his family in cold blood. There would not be communism in Russia today if had not been for Charles Darwin's book on evolution.

Kent Hovind

#46. 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

#47. frequently recommend Miller's book, Finding Darwin's God,

Richard Dawkins

#48. Darwin's Theory of Evolution is the worst way to explain the mysteries of life, except for Creationism.

Roberto Quaglia

#49. I read five books on the Constitution. My favorite was 'Plain, Honest Men' by Richard Beeman. I went on a science jag in the same way. I kept getting in arguments about evolution and being bested. So I read Charles Darwin's 'On the Origin of the Species,' a fantastic book that is not that difficult.

Denis O'Hare

#50. Darwin's idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition.

Daniel Dennett

#51. Contrary to the legend, Darwin's finches do not appear to have inspired his earliest theoretical views on evolution, even after he finally became an evolutionist in 1837; rather it was his evolutionary views that allowed him, retrospectively, to understand the complex case of the finches.

Frank Sulloway

#52. In nature's cyclical rhythms, there are no grounds for the discriminatory view that underlies Darwin's view of superiority and inferiority that deems single-celled organisms as lower, and more complicated life forms as higher. It would be more appropriate to say we are all one continuous life-form.

Masanobu Fukuoka

#53. Well, biology today as I see it has an amiable look - quite different from the 19th-century view that the whole arrangement of nature is hostile, 'red in tooth and claw.' That came about because people misread Darwin's 'survival of the fittest.'

Lewis Thomas

#54. 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

#55. But, as we have before been led to remark, most of Mr. Darwin's statements elude, by their vagueness and incompleteness, the test of Natural History facts.

Richard Owen

#56. Sir Julian Huxley, one of the world's leading evolutionists, head of UNESCO, descendant of Thomas Huxley - Darwin's bulldog - said on a talk show, 'I suppose the reason we leaped at The Origin of Species was because the idea of God interfered with our sexual mores.'.

Julian Huxley

#57. British astronomer Fred Hoyle said something to this effect: That believing in Darwin's theoretical mechanisms of evolution was like believing that a hurricane could blow through a junkyard and build a Boeing 747

Kurt Vonnegut

#58. The mere fact that so many who espouse such far-right views and beliefs still exist in this society is incarnate proof that Darwin's theories apply solely to biological processes and not to processes of the spirit.

Derek R. Audette

#59. The world has arisen in some way or another. How it originated is the great question, and Darwin's theory, like all other attempts, to explain the origin of life, is thus far merely conjectural. I believe he has not even made the best conjecture possible in the present state of our knowledge.

Louis Agassiz

#60. When most of us hear the phrase, 'survival of the fittest,' we assume it originated with Charles Darwin. It did not. The phrase doesn't exist anywhere in Darwin's first edition of 'Origin of the Species.'

Joel A. Barker

#61. Darwin's theory of evolution pointed to the conclusion that flux (or becoming), not being, is the essence of reality. Though

Henri Bergson

#62. Prison is the only place, where Darwin's Theory of Evolution may seem to work. Survival of the fittest does only work, where the fittest is defined as the most loving.

Raphael Zernoff

#63. It is extraordinary the extent to which Darwin's insights not only changed his contemporaries' view of the world but also continue to be a source of great intellectual stimulation for scientists and nonscientists alike.

James D. Watson

#64. There are gaps in the fossil graveyard, places where there should be intermediate forms, but where there is nothing whatsoever instead. No paleontologist..denies that this is so. It is simply a fact, Darwin's theory and the fossil record are in conflict.

David Berlinski

#65. Darwin's prediction of rampant, albeit gradual, change affecting all lineages through time is refuted. The record is there, and the record speaks for tremendous anatomical conservatism. Change in the manner Darwin expected is just not found in the fossil record.

Niles Eldredge

#66. Evolution has primarily been an attack on religion by militant atheists who wrap themselves in the mantle of science in an effort to refute all religious claims concerning a creator - an effort that has also often attempted to suppress all scientific criticisms of Darwin's work.

Rodney Stark

#67. You know teenage boys, you own one-Mason Lerner

Natasha Larry

#68. They would ask people to do
something that is wrong? I thought angels were ... " She stumbled, trying to
think of a word to describe her preconceived notion. "Angelic," Jaycie Lerner

Natasha Larry

#69. Haylee shook her head as soon as they were gone. Christ, how can our family be mankind's best hope?

Natasha Larry

#70. I often think of the different ways Goethe and Darwin got at evolution. Goethe had the poetic conception of it all right; Darwin worked it out step by step. Who's ahead? And which has any business scoffing at the other?

Susan Glaspell

#71. A teacher's job is to take a bunch of live wires and see that they are well-grounded.

Darwin D. Martin

#72. Whatever the degree to which Darwin may have "misled science into a dead end," the biologist Shi V. Liu observed in commenting on Koonin's paper, "we may still appreciate the role of Darwin in helping scientists [win an] upper hand in fighting against the creationists.

David Berlinski

#73. Dedicated to the memory of MY FATHER. For if I had not believed that he would have wished me to give such help as I could toward making his life's work of service to mankind, I should never have been led to write this book.

Leonard Darwin

#74. Well, my mother did teach me a killer family recipe for a Bloody Mary. I guess I can make that next Thanksgiving-Haylee Mitchell

Natasha Larry

#75. The limit of man s knowledge in any subject possesses a high interest which is perhaps increased by its close neighbourhood to the realms of imagination.

Charles Darwin

#76. But Natural Selection, as we shall hereafter see, is a power incessantly ready for action, and is immeasurably superior to man's feeble efforts, as the works of Nature are to those of Art.

Charles Darwin

#77. Even the humblest mammal's strong sexual, parental, and social instincts give rise to 'do unto others as yourself' and 'love thy neighbor as thyself'.

Charles Darwin

#78. Thomson's views on the recent age of the world have been for some time one of my sorest troubles.

Charles Darwin

#79. But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?

Charles Darwin

#80. A man's friendships are one of the best measures of his worth.

Charles Darwin

#81. As countries appear and disappear, then I began to ask, what makes countries successful? And it turns out, after a long slog through geographies and ethnicities and all kinds of variables, it's the ability to adapt and adopt, what Darwin talked about.

Juan Enriquez

#82. The very essence of instinct is that it's followed independently of reason.

Charles Darwin

#83. It's chance, I tell you,' he interrupted, ' as everything is in a man's life.

H.G.Wells

#84. I am one who believes that the world goes from the slime to the sublime. And you can take Darwin and all your philosophers and all your ontologists, and that's the direction.

Mario Cuomo

#85. 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

#86. Darwin- I think the theory is: out of 'chaos' arises something that resembles 'design'. But it's all random.

Joyce Carol Oates

#87. No radiant pearl, which crested Fortune wears, No gem that twinkling hangs from Beauty's wars. Not the bright stars which Night's blue arch adorn, Nor rising suns that gild the vernal morn, Shine with such lustre as the tear that flows Down Virtue's manly cheek for others' woes.

Erasmus Darwin

#88. Why did it take so long for a Darwin to arrive on the scene? What delayed humanity's tumbling to that luminously simple idea which seems, on the face of it, so much easier to grasp than the mathematical ideas given us by Newton two centuries earlier - or, indeed, by Archimedes two millennia earlier?

Richard Dawkins

#89. Darwin got it all wrong, you see. Fitness has nothing to do with it. It's survival of the sickest. That's all.

Philip Ridley

#90. Marathon running, for me, was the most controlled test of mettle that I could ever think of. It's you against Darwin.

Ryan Reynolds

#91. Wilder's father might have known Darwin when he studied at Cambridge.

April White

#92. The more one thinks, the more one feels the hopeless immensity of man's ignorance.

Charles Darwin

#93. If you found a mammal with feathers, then you'd know that Darwin was wrong. Well, it's rather the same with memes.

Susan Blackmore

#94. You're going on birth control ... or I will smash your truck-Allison Young

Natasha Larry

#95. One of the biggest religions on Roundworld was founded by a carpenter's son!' Ponder snarled. 'For years, the most powerful person on the planet was an actor! There's got to be room for Darwin!

Terry Pratchett

#96. But then arises the doubt, can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animal, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions?

Charles Darwin

#97. All organisms vary, and it's just folk knowledge. You just have to look around a room of people, and everybody knows that it's true. Darwin didn't know the mechanism of heredity, but you don't have to. You just need to know the fact of it.

Stephen Jay Gould

#98. I think an Agnostic would be the more correct description of my state of mind. The whole subject [of God] is beyond the scope of man's intellect.

Charles Darwin

#99. Life is brought down to the basics: if you are warm, regular, healthy, not thirsty or hungry, then you are not on a mountain ... Climbing at altitude is like hitting your head against a brick wall - it's great when you stop.

Chris Darwin

#100. Darwin Award. That's not a real award, it's a joke. They give them to people who die doing something so stupid that it counts as a service to humanity.

Gregg Dunnett