Top 100 Evolutionary Quotes
#1. God is the evolutionary impulse of the universe. God is infinite creativity, infinite love, infinite compassion, infinite caring.
Deepak Chopra
#2. Islands are havens and breeding grounds for the unique and anomalous. They are natural laboratories of extravagant evolutionary experimentation.
David Quammen
#3. I speak about universal evolution and teleological evolution; because I think the process of evolution reflects the wisdom of nature. I see the need for wisdom to become operative. We need to try to put all of these things together in what I call an evolutionary philosophy of our time.
Jonas Salk
#4. Some theists in evolutionary science acquiesce to these tacit rules and retain a personal faith while accepting a thoroughly naturalistic picture of physical reality.
Phillip E. Johnson
#6. The contemporary Planned Parenthood movement was started by a woman named Margaret Sanger, who defended abortion rights on the basis of eugenics, the search for "good genes" based on the racist and evolutionary notions of "social Darwinism" prevalent in her day.
Russell D. Moore
#7. Okay,' she said, and kissed him, already feeling so relieved. And feeling some sort of evolutionary satisfaction. Like she'd made the right decision picking this man; he was going to find all the best sticks for their nest and chase off all the predators.
Rainbow Rowell
#8. Evolutionary psychology is one of four sciences that are bringing human nature back into the picture.
Steven Pinker
#9. It is good to realize that falling apart is not such a bad thing. Indeed, it is as essential to evolutionary and psychological transformation as the cracking of outgrown shells.
Joanna Macy
#10. It will be in the convergence of evolutionary biology, developmental biology and cancer biology that the answer to cancer will lie. Nor will this confluence be a one-way street.
Paul Davies
#11. Religion is nothing more than a useless and sometimes dangerous, evolutionary accident. Religious behavior may be a misfiring, an unfortunate byproduct of an underlying psychological propensity which in other circumstances is, or once was, useful.
Richard Dawkins
#12. Evolutionary cosmology formulates theories in which a universe is capable of giving rise to and generating future universes out of itself, within black holes or whatever.
Robert Nozick
#13. There aren't just bad people that commit genocide; we are all capable of it. It's our evolutionary history.
James Lovelock
#14. The evolutionary facts about the emergence of man, e.g., the sudden appearance of Homo sapiens sapiens (Cro-Magnon man) no more than 35 thousand years ago, are as spectacular as the account in Genesis and allow hardly less room for theology.
Walker Percy
#15. Humanity is reaching the end of the evolutionary stage of ego. The closer we get to the end, the more dysfunctional humanity becomes.
Eckhart Tolle
#16. I thought I was a revolutionary and was only an evolutionary.
Kathe Kollwitz
#17. The more we learn about life, the less plausible is any evolutionary theory that relies on blind, undirected, piece-by-piece change.
Nancy Pearcey
#18. In the past even scientists have been led to believe that only human beings have thoughts or emotions. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth ... After all, thoughts and emotions have evolutionary value.
Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
#19. We as a human community need to develop a new competency. We need to move from a single-cell social organism to a multicellular social organism. While making this evolutionary leap is no easy task, staring into the abyss is a strong motivator.
David Gershon
#20. I declare that The Beatles are mutants. Prototypes of evolutionary agents sent by God, endowed with a mysterious power to create a new human species, a young race of laughing freemen.
Timothy Leary
#21. If we stand by the eagle, fish will die; if we stand by the fish, eagle will die! This dilemma has been created by the random evolutionary process. There is no goodness, there is no justice and there is no intelligence in here. We are living in a primitive and flawed order.
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#22. Philosophy can help laymen spot and reject the numerous pseudoscientific beliefs that survive in the media, such as the fantasies of psychoanalysts, evolutionary psychologists, and economic equilibrium theorists.
Mario Bunge
#23. To me it's awe-inspiring ... All those billions of little evolutionary steps leading to this sensation of being "me."
Simon Boswell
#24. An evolutionary biologist and a fundamentalist may see the same chimpanzee sitting in a cage, but in another important way, they do not. And they may approach the details of their lives in very different ways.
Peg O'Connor
#25. Art is the inheritance of every individual, it activates evolutionary growth, it is an intellectual virtue, and the fostering principle for all that is made, done, or known.
Alonzo King
#26. The eternal argument over so-called entitlement programs - and, more broadly, over liberal and conservative thought - will never be resolved because each side represents an ancient and absolutely essential component of our evolutionary past.
Sebastian Junger
#27. Transforming a team, let alone an entire organisation, from the principles of command and control to those based on servant-leadership, from plans based on prediction to plans based on empirical, evolutionary data requires both patience and tenacity.
Geoff Watts
#28. Perhaps our greatest distinction as a species is our capacity, unique among animals, to make counter-evolutionary choices.
Jared Diamond
#29. What an odd time to be a fundamentalist about adaptation and natural selection - when each major subdiscipline of evolutionary biology has been discovering other mechanisms as adjuncts to selection's centrality.
Stephen Jay Gould
#30. Nonconformity is the highest evolutionary attainment of social animals.
Aldo Leopold
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. Synergistic convergence is the most important idea we have at our disposal to prevent collapse scenarios and move forward in a nonlinear manner toward an evolutionary society.
Barbara Marx Hubbard
#34. There is only a blind evolutionary process, devoid of any purpose, leading to the birth of individuals. 'Endowed
Yuval Noah Harari
#35. I think we're proving ourselves as we go along. The past several months our strategy has been evolutionary - making maximum advantage of our client browser, as well as our enterprise software for people who want to build Web sites.
Jim Barksdale
#36. Change in my work happens not in revolutions - it's more evolutionary.
Wolfgang Tillmans
#37. Each one of us decides to incarnate upon this planet at a particular point in time and space. We have chosen to come here to learn a particular lesson that will advance us upon our spiritual, evolutionary pathway.
Louise L. Hay
#38. Perhaps violence, like pornography, is some kind of an evolutionary standby system, a last-resort device for throwing a wild joker into the game?
J.G. Ballard
#39. 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
#40. Darwinism has failed in practice. The whole aim and purpose of Darwinism is to show how modern forms descended from ancient forms, that is, to construct reliable phylogenies [evolutionary family trees]. In this it has utterly failed.
Norman Macbeth
#41. One of the things about genetics that has become clearer as we've done genomes - as we've worked our way through the evolutionary tree, including humans - is that we're probably much more genetic animals than we want to confess we are.
Craig Venter
#42. Visit a typical science classroom and you will discover far more than empirical facts being taught. The dominant worldview among scientific intellectuals is evolutionary naturalism, which holds that humans are essentially biochemical machines.
Nancy Pearcey
#43. There are two kinds of paradises in our universe: The ones which have been created by the evolutionary processes and the ones which have been created by the living beings! There exists no other paradise!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#44. Cats don't bark and act brave when they see something small in fur or feathers, they kill it. Dogs tend to bravado. They're braggarts. In the great evolutionary drama the dog is Sergeant Bilko, the cat is Rambo.
James P. Gorman
#45. I believe greatness is an evolutionary process that changes and evolves era to era.
Michael Jordan
#46. 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
#47. Colossal rigidity, whether in dinosaurs or dictatorships, has a very poor record of evolutionary survival.
Carl R. Rogers
#48. 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
#49. Though why should we expect age to mellow us? If it isn't life's business to reward merit, why should it be life's business to give us warm comfortable feelings towards its end? What possible evolutionary purpose could nostalgia serve?
Julian Barnes
#50. I want to see books taken out of historical time and placed into a different timeline, such as evolutionary or geological time, as a means of putting the human experience in context.
Douglas Coupland
#51. The only problem is that it's difficult to imagine something entirely new. We use the words and definitions of the past to shape our ideas. Something that is genuinely the next evolutionary step is unlikely to resemble anything we can imagine. Even the best books on the subject are limited." She'd
Genevieve Cogman
#52. We have become, by the power of a glorious evolutionary accident called intelligence, the stewards of life's continuity on earth. We did not ask for this role, but we cannot abjure it. We may not be suited to it, but here we are.
Stephen Jay Gould
#53. As for the presence of large NGF [nerve growth factor] sources in snake venom and male genital organs, they may be conceived as instances of bizarre evolutionary gene expression.
Rita Levi-Montalcini
#54. Evolutionary naturalism takes the inherent limitations of science and turns them into a devastating philosophical weapon: because science is our only real way of knowing anything, what science cannot know cannot be real.
Phillip E. Johnson
#56. Design is a series of creative choices - it's a collaborative effort, an evolutionary process. You choose your fabrics depending upon what you want to say, then you work with mills to get those fabrics. Through the process, you realize what you want it to be.
Marc Jacobs
#57. This was perhaps the evolutionary usefulness of the elderly, Bao had concluded: to give the young some kind of psychic shield from reality, putting them under a description which allowed them to ignore the fact that age and death would come to them too, and could come early and out of sequence.
Kim Stanley Robinson
#58. Self-esteem starts out as a personal blessing, but it becomes nothing less than an evolutionary force.
Gloria Steinem
#59. 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
#60. This nationality business helps you make a great story and satisfies your hunger for ascription of causes. It seems to be the dump site where all explanations go until one can ferret out a more obvious one (such as, say, some evolutionary argument that "makes sense"). Indeed,
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#61. To an evolutionary psychologist, the universal extravagance of religious rituals, with their costs in time, resources, pain and privation, should suggest as vividly as a mandrills bottom that religion may be adaptive. - MAREK KOHN
Richard Dawkins
#62. Each horizon, each place holds its own evolutionary power be it the prairie or the plateaus, the mountains or the marshes at Great Salt Lake. For me, this is the nature of peace. Our task is to learn how to see it, feel it, hear it, and care for these places as our own home ground.
Terry Tempest Williams
#63. I believe there is an evolutionary impulse toward good that is etched on every human heart. It is placed there by the hand of God.
Marianne Williamson
#64. Ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transitions than we had in Darwin's time.
David M. Raup
#65. One reasonable reaction to evolutionary psychology is a self-consciousness so acute, and a cynicism so deep, that ironic detachment from the whole human enterprise may provide the only relief.
Robert Wright
#66. In fact, the socialization gives us the tools to fill our evolutionary roles. They are our building blocks.
Warren Farrell
#67. I have a theory that evolutionary biologists are more vain than particle physicists.
Robin Ince
#68. Nature's government spontaneously brings satisfaction to everyone because it promotes all innumerable, diverse tendencies of life in the evolutionary direction.
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
#69. 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
#70. The universe, the solar system, and planet earth in themselves and in their evolutionary emergence constitute for the human community the primary revelation of that ultimate mystery whence all things emerge into being.
Thomas Berry
#71. That is to say, our physical ability to understand time has been honed by evolutionary pressures to select for traits useful for survival, in all aspects, and time perception is no exception or special case or even magical or mysterious case.
Charles Yu
#72. Nothing snubs quite like a cat. What evolutionary purpose did it serve, this inherent disdain, this artful blanking?
Will Wiles
#73. There are so many ways to characterize evolutionary success. If one criterion is the number of millions of years that the species persists, we're still just infants. We're way too young of a species to tell if we were a creative fluke or if we have any staying power.
Greg Graffin
#74. An animal so poor in spirit that he won't even fight on his own behalf is already an evolutionary dead end; the best he can do for his breed is to crawl off and die, and not pass on his defective genes.
Robert A. Heinlein
#75. When a trait is universal, evolutionary biologists look for a genetic explanation and wonder how that gene or genes might enhance survival or reproductive success.
Robin Marantz Henig
#76. That all species are related in the flow of life and death is a keystone of evolutionary theory. The grandeur displayed in this view of life is ecological in character.
Elizabeth A. Johnson
#77. We can continue to try and clean up the gutters all over the world and spend all of our resources looking at just the dirty spots and trying to make them clean. Or we can lift our eyes up and look into the skies and move forward in an evolutionary way.
Buzz Aldrin
#78. I'm saying that we should trust our intuition. I believe that the principles of universal evolution are revealed to us through intuition. And I think that if we combine our intuition and our reason, we can respond in an evolutionary sound way to our problems.
Jonas Salk
#79. Technology is the means by which we have decommissioned natural selection and are seizing control. We are no longer to be victims of some blind evolutionary process where sentient beings are massacred by entropy.
Jason Silva
#80. There is is again, that slight stinging sensation of the cheeks. It's our body's light speed response to the world showing us up. And it's one of life's most unpleasant feelings, leaving one to wonder what evolutionary purpose it could possible serve.
Amor Towles
#81. The shift to Evolutionary-Teal structures, practices, and cultures liberates tremendous energies that previously were bottled up, unavailable. And with the shift to Teal, these energies get harnessed and directed with more clarity and wisdom toward productive ends.
Frederic Laloux
#82. Evolutionary psychology tells us that men, especially powerful men, feel invincible and entitled to spread their seed, and that women can't resist the scent of masculine power. Women, by contrast, are said to be more altruistic and collaborative, seeking power so that they can share it with others.
Hanna Rosin
#83. I can't think of anyone who is up on evolutionary psychology and related areas who is deluded enough to be called a utopian.
Keith Henson
#84. When you are just thinking a lot of silly thoughts and having a lot of worries, you waste a tremendous energy and power and you put yourself into very limited states of mind. You slow down your evolutionary process.
Frederick Lenz
#85. I think civilization is going to get to a point where we suddenly become responsible, stewards of the whole evolutionary process. This requires domains of consciousness, not just levels and frequencies.
Jean Houston
#86. Occult powers, on the other hand, are much wider-ranging. They involve the ability to change dimensional structures and the evolutionary path of sentient beings.
Frederick Lenz
#87. In wilderness people can find the silence and the solitude and the noncivilized surroundings that can connect them once again to their evolutionary heritage, and through an experience of the eternal mystery, can give them a sense of the sacredness of all creation.
Sigurd F. Olson
#88. Capitalism is not so much an aberration as a step on an evolutionary path, and one that contains within it some of the answers to its own contradictions.
Geoff Mulgan
#89. I think there is probably something evolutionary in that we are drawn to the easiest option. But in our age of convenience, cars, ready meals and off the peg mean that we are in danger of being mentally under stretched.
Philippa Perry
#90. From an evolutionary point of view, most emotions - fear, desire, anger - serve some practical purpose, but nostalgia is a useless, futile thing because it is a longing for something that is permanently lost ...
David Nicholls
#91. Despite the Great Chain of Being's traditional ranking of humans between animals and angels, there is no evolutionary justification for the common assumption that evolution is somehow 'aimed' at humans, or that humans are 'evolution's last word'.
Richard Dawkins
#92. This triple-decker reflects our evolutionary development from the earliest model (single-celled bacteria) to the latest (George Clooney). Each
Ruby Wax
#93. I was never raised with the traditional story of creation in religion, and because of that I think I had a lot of questions. And evolution, the evolutionary narrative, helped provide some of that for me.
Greg Graffin
#94. They are merely partaking of the evolutionary miracle found most obviously in man, but not necessarily any more useful to his survival than a raven's, or a cat's, or a chimp's is to its.
William H Gass
#95. Just imagine, among 8.7 million species, only one has become smart enough to ponder over the meaning of life. This simple evolutionary fact itself implies the gravitas of human life.
Abhijit Naskar
#96. Anything that's motivated from fear will ultimately take you down the wrong road and lead you in a cul de sac, anything motivated from purpose, from joy, and from love will take you on an evolutionary path to greater and greater happiness.
Jack Canfield
#97. The great evolutionary biologist J B S Haldane (1892-1964), on being asked by a cleric what biology could say about the Creator, entertainingly replied, 'I'm really not sure, except that the Creator, if he exists, must have an inordinate fondness of beetles.
David Beerling
#98. Robert Zubrin's masterful study ... makes for riveting reading. a cautionary tale of what happens when powerful, unprincipled elites are not only alienated from the mass of their fellow men, but come to see them as a barrier to imagined social, evolutionary, or environmental progress.
Steven W. Mosher
#99. Just as the economic success of a company is measured only by the number of dollars in its bank account, not by the happiness of its employees, so the evolutionary success of a species is measured by the number of copies of its DNA.
Yuval Noah Harari
#100. I'll show that religion is (probably) an evolutionary adaptation for binding groups together and helping them to create communities with a shared morality. It is not a virus or a parasite, as some scientists (the "New Atheists") have argued in recent years.
Jonathan Haidt
