Evolutionary Quotes

#1. There is no controversy within science over the core proposition of evolutionary theory.

Kenneth R. Miller

#2. I remember my first lecture on my first day in evolutionary biology, how populations and species change. I sat thinking, 'Why doesn't everyone know this?' I look back on it almost in horror: I came so close to not knowing how exciting our world is.

Elise Andrew

#3. Not that chance dominated events in the early Solar System, for scientific determinism was also functioning. But chance is an essential factor in all evolutionary events, and the birth and development of our planetary system were not exceptions.

Eric Chaisson

#4. If there is as a continuum from self-reproducing molecules, such as DNA, to microbes, and an evolutionary sequence continuum from microbes to humans, why should we imagine that continuum to stop at humans?

Carl Sagan

#5. Idea that people from the next village are as human as ourselves, it is presumptuous in the extreme to suppose we could ever look at sociable, tool-making creatures who arose from other evolutionary paths

Orson Scott Card

#6. Religion is the best antidote to the individualism of the consumer age. The idea that society can do without it flies in the face of history and, now, evolutionary biology.

Jonathan Sacks

#7. I do agree with Stich that a quick move from our evolutionary origins to the reliability of our cognitive mechanisms is not legitimate. As I see it, the case for the reliability or unreliability of various cognitive mechanisms lies elsewhere.

Hilary Kornblith

#8. Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts which simply do not make evolutionary sense.

Richard Dawkins

#9. Moreover, the concern of some that moving DNA among species would breach customary breeding barriers and have profound effects on natural evolutionary processes has substantially disappeared as the science revealed that such exchanges occur in nature.

Paul Berg

#10. There are very good evolutionary reasons for having religion. From early human history we have evolved a need to see God. We have a perception of ourselves and in order for that to be a true perception we have to believe in a soul within us.

Jonathan Trigell

#11. If we are merely a chance product of 'random happenstance' and nothing more, doesn't it strike you as a bit odd that we have the ability to contemplate the question of 'random happenstance' with such methodical complexity?

Craig D. Lounsbrough

#12. With the opening of the second decade of the twentieth century it seemed that the stage was set for the last act in an unquestioned evolutionary drama.

Ralph Adams Cram

#13. Humanity as a whole has already gone through unimaginable suffering, mostly self-inflicted, the culmination of which was the 20th century with its unspeakable horrors. This collective suffering has brought upon a readiness in many human beings for the evolutionary leap that is spiritual awakening.

Eckhart Tolle

#14. Evolutionary learning calls upon our creative potentials as it empowers us to envision images of the future and bring those images to life by design.

Bela H. Banathy

#15. Humanity is now experiencing history's most difficult evolutionary transformation.

R. Buckminster Fuller

#16. In terms of evolutionary history, it was only yesterday that men learned to walk around on two legs and get in trouble thinking complicated thoughts. So don't worry, you'll burn out.

Haruki Murakami

#17. The evolutionary epic is ... the best myth we will ever have.

E. O. Wilson

#18. [Pleasure is what suggested] which behaviors, emotions, social patterns and patterns of taste served us well during our evolutionary history. They were experienced as pleasures and encoded into our formative genetic codes ... deep in the past, from about 100,000 years ago and beyond.

Lionel Tiger

#19. This one word "Love" has revolutionized the whole planet in an evolutionary way. Without this, none of us might have been born.

Abhijit Naskar

#20. What's popularly known as the evolution of consciousness, in other words that the expansion of cognitive repertoire that occurs in human beings, which has always been a great puzzle to evolutionary theory, I believe, occurred in the presence of a kind of catalyst for the human imagination.

Terence McKenna

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

Abhijit Naskar

#22. 'So You Think You Can Dance' comes on as a high-minded leap up the evolutionary ladder from other reality shows - on this one, you're supposed to learn something, and the guest judges are fellow dance professionals rather than actual celebrities.

Rob Sheffield

#23. As far as Rachel Tracey was concerned, builders who tried their luck with lone women were pretty low down on the evolutionary ladder. She

Kate Ellis

#24. If the evolutionary mechanism of natural selection depends on death, destruction, and violence of the strong against the weak, then these things are perfectly natural. On what basis, then, does the atheist judge the natural world to be horribly wrong, unfair, and unjust?

Timothy Keller

#25. The fact that mammalian crying serves as a cue for maternal support, rather than as a dinner bell, is a major evolutionary difference.

Matthew D. Lieberman

#26. All living things must grow or they will die. Adaptation to change is a characteristic of all living systems. Thus, all living things must grow, adapt, evolve, or die. Evolution is nature's creative way of pushing living organisms to higher degrees of complexity. We adapt up, not compromise down.

Alvin Conway

#27. Increasing complexity on its own is not, however, the ultimate goal or end-product of these evolutionary processes. Evolution results in better answers, not necessarily more complicated ones. Sometimes a superior solution is a simpler one.

Ray Kurzweil

#28. The urgency to mate persists in all people as in all other mammals because of the evolutionary drive to continue the species, the inborn imperative for genes to reproduce and hormonal differences that evolved over millions of years.

Lynn Margulis

#29. The evolutionary explanation for origins, although impossible either to prove or to test scientifically, is nevertheless defended by its proponents on the basis that it is the only explanation which is naturalistic, not involving the 'supernatural' element of a divine Creator.

Henry M. Morris

#30. Sometimes things can take a very long time and still not be very good. It took us all of evolutionary history just to get where we are today, for instance, and mostly where we are today is on the couch.

Gina Barreca

#31. Feeling had controlling influence over those primitive people, not thinking. It played a crucial part in the evolutionary development of modern humans. That's why we humans are basically an emotional species alongside being the smartest one.

Abhijit Naskar

#32. The gorillas are not yet sufficiently advanced in evolutionary terms to have discovered the benefits of passports, currency-declaration forms, and official bribery, and therefore tend to wander backward and forward across the border as and when their beastly, primitive whim takes them.

Douglas Adams

#33. The advance of genetic engineering makes it quite conceivable that we will begin to design our own evolutionary progress.

Isaac Asimov

#34. I am a believer in the evolutionary process, and yet I have sympathy for the friends of mine who are creationists. I don't find the positions incompatible.

John Rhys-Davies

#35. We are in a survival mentality, and that's hard-wired into our humanity, because we are the winners of an evolutionary struggle of millions and millions and millions of years.

John Shelby Spong

#36. I think it's tragic that we have this human capacity, which appears to be hardwired, or so the evolutionary biologists say, for collective joy. We have these techniques for generating it that go back thousands of years, and yet we tend not to use this.

Barbara Ehrenreich

#37. I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet. It is staring us in the face. It is still in its infancy, still drfiting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate which leaves the old gene panting far behind.

Richard Dawkins

#38. Left to their own devices, women would stop having sex after they have children. There's no evolutionary need for it. Our brains know it, our body knows it. Who feels sexy during the slog of motherhood, the middle-aged fat roll and the flattening butt?

Maria Semple

#39. Every action is a karmic episode because action generates memory, memory generates desire, and desire generates action again. As you become conscious of these seeds of manifestation, you become a conscious choice maker, and the actions you generate will be evolutionary.

Deepak Chopra

#40. It must be significant that nearly all the evolutionary stories I learned as a student ... have now been debunked.

D. V. Ager

#41. By preventing dangerous asteroid strikes, we can save millions of people, or even our entire species. And, as human beings, we can take responsibility for preserving this amazing evolutionary experiment of which we and all life on Earth are a part.

Rusty Schweickart

#42. Whenever a few people are gathered with a spiritual impulse to connect, to resonate through the heart, to make a shift from their own ego to their essence, and then to connect to do whatever work in the world they are called to do, that's an evolutionary circle.

Barbara Marx Hubbard

#43. As Fuller stated, humanity's next evolutionary challenge is to learn to cooperate and solve our global problems.

Robert T. Kiyosaki

#44. For an animal, the past is largely a waste of precious resources, since it gives them little evolutionary advantage. But simulating the future, given the lessons of the past, is an essential reason why humans became intelligent.

Michio Kaku

#45. The word 'monster' [monstrum] derives from 'demonstrare,' meaning to show or to demonstrate. Heresy and evolutionary change are thus mere intrusions into a homogenous perception of reality. My vocation, I decided, would be to make my life an example.

But of what?

Steve Abbott

#46. From an evolutionary perspective, exercise tricks the brain into trying to maintain itself for survival despite the hormonal cues that it is aging.

John J. Ratey

#47. Culture is the most potent method of adaptation that has emerged in the evolutionary history of the living world. - Theodosius Dobzhanksky ... the 'facts' of culture history are interpretations based upon assumed culture process.

Jerry Sabloff

#48. In my opinion, we're here because we won the evolutionary lottery. We're here because as far as we know this is the only place we can be.
"So, basically what your sayings is", Lizzy says ... "We're here because we're here?"
"Precisely!" Dr. Grady says.

Wendy Mass

#49. Probably the single most important evolutionary trait dogs developed was right there at the outset, illuminated by the campfire. It is in those eyebrows and in the way dogs have of tilting their heads. They are warm packages of emotions.

Bill Buford

#50. Unlike the clonal longevity of asexual organisms, sexually reproduced plants and animals usually have briefer, individual life cycles. In short, the enormous diversity afforded by the evolutionary invention of sexual reproduction came with a price - death of the individual.

Richard J. Borden

#51. The culmination of all of that was the decision to start a company, which became Lotus, to do a product, which became 1-2-3. By the time I reached that point it had been four years, and it felt like a lifetime, but really it was kind of evolutionary.

Mitch Kapor

#52. Repression is an evolutionary adaptation permitting us to function under the burden of our expanded consciousness. For what we are conscious of could drive us mad.

Camille Paglia

#53. Fear, anxiety, stress and panic, all these are basic evolutionary expression of the human brain. They are part of the normal human condition.

Abhijit Naskar

#54. When I went to high school in Australia, I was exposed to textbooks that outlined evolutionary ideas - such as ape-like creatures turning into people. I recognized the conflict between evolutionary ideas and a literal reading of the book of Genesis.

Ken Ham

#55. You've won the evolutionary lottery: You're a vampire. Let's go to Disneyland!

J.R. Ward

#56. You are a side effect," Van Houten continued, "of an evolutionary process that cares little for individual lives. You are a failed experiment in mutation.

John Green

#57. To conquer, you must endure not just your own suffering but the suffering of others. Indifference is the ultimate evolutionary achievement, the highest rung on nature's ladder.

Rick Yancey

#58. Aggression, rage and violence are archetypal foundations of manhood.

Abhijit Naskar

#59. We are one evolutionary advancement away from world peace. All we need is the loss of jealousy, which is also the source of greed

Johnny Moscato

#60. The biological evolutionary perception of life and of human qualities is radically different from that of traditional religion, whether it's Southern Baptist or Islam or any religion that believes in a supernatural supervalance over humanity.

E. O. Wilson

#61. Cockroach: What is war?
Man: How we lost the human race.

Anthony Marais

#62. Revenge is the thinking man's reflex, a complex blend of action and consistency no other animal species has so far succeeded in evolving. Evolutionary speaking, the practice of taking revenge has shown itself to the so effective that only the most vengeful of us have survived.

Jo Nesbo

#63. Nothing in our evolutionary history specifically prepared us to live in large societies. Almost everything about the way culture works does.

Mark Pagel

#64. Art is an evolutionary act. The shape of art and its role in society is constantly changing. At no point is art static. There are no rules.

Raymond Salvatore Harmon

#65. The typical imperative from biology is not "Thou shalt ... ," but "If ... then ... else.

Steven Pinker

#66. Riding trails with your dog restores a bond lost in some evolutionary belch. You travel at the same speed, over the same terrain, neither of you slowing to compensate for the other. You're equal playmates with mud in your teeth.

Allison Glock

#67. Most students are presented only with the evolutionary belief system in their schools, and they are censored from hearing challenges to it. Let our young people understand science correctly and hear both sides of the origins issue and then evaluate them.

Ken Ham

#68. 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

#69. There is more to the human mind than its evolutionary heritage.

Kenan Malik

#70. Regardless of all our pretenses, deep within, we are still unconsciously the same old cave-people.

Abhijit Naskar

#71. Evolutionary theory informs our understanding of some frankly inexcusable social behavior and renders it perfectly normal.

Richard K. Morgan

#72. Evolutionary game theory is a way of thinking about evolution at the phenotypic level when the fitnesses of particular phenotypes depend on their frequencies in the population.

John Maynard Smith

#73. Year-end financial statements ... express a truth about office life which is no less irrefutable yet also, in the end, no less irrelevant or irritating than an evolutionary biologist's proud reminder that the purpose of existence lies in the propagation of our genes.

Alain De Botton

#74. Innovation is an evolutionary process, so it's not necessary to be radical all the time.

Marc Jacobs

#75. If you go back and look at the early promos for Gears 1, you'll see just how different the characters were from the actual first game, both in appearance and background. And it's an evolutionary process.

Karen Traviss

#76. Starting with mice, cats, and going up the evolutionary scale of animals.

Michio Kaku

#77. To live in an evolutionary spirit means to engage with full ambition and without any reserve in the structure of the present, and yet to let go and flow into a new structure when the right time has come.

Erich Jantsch

#78. In short, it is not that evolutionary naturalists have been less brazen than the scientific creationists in holding science hostage, but rather that they have been infinitely more effective in getting away with it.

Phillip E. Johnson

#79. Evolution has no moral direction. An evolutionary understanding of human nature can explain the differing intuitions we have when we are faced with an individual rather than with a mass of people, or with people close to us rather than with those far away, but it does not justify those feelings.

Peter Singer

#80. Creativity is the evolutionary impulse in the Universe.

Deepak Chopra

#81. Indeed, I was unable to find any evidence whatsoever of the occurrence of a drastic evolutionary acceleration and genetic reconstruction in widespread, populous species.

Ernst Mayr

#82. Life is never static. Despite catastrophic tragedies, life has persisted in evolving new varieties of unimaginable forms. I find comfort in the narrative of evolutionary history.

Greg Graffin

#83. You and your SoulMate are pioneers on the frontier of spiritual partnerships. You are the cusp of the next evolutionary wave. As architects of true SoulMate relationships, you are the Magellans of inner space.

Annette Vaillancourt

#84. People talk about human intelligence as the greatest adaptation in the history of the planet. It is an amazing and marvelous thing, but in evolutionary terms, it is as likely to do us in as to help us along.

Stephen Jay Gould

#85. What I think is new is the wealth of roles for actual women in television and in film. That's what I think is revolutionary and evolutionary.

Maggie Gyllenhaal

#86. As a social primate species, we modulate our morals with signals from family, friends and social groups with whom we identify because in our evolutionary past, those attributes helped individuals to survive and reproduce.

Michael Shermer

#87. Right and wrong are not simply matters of evolutionary impacts and what is natural.

Julian Baggini

#88. The point is to create a system where individuals don't work simply for money or personal gain but to support the planet and its inhabitants in entering the next stage of evolutionary progression.

Michael Beckwith

#89. Our evolutionary psychology preconditions us not to respond to threats which can be postponed until later.

Mark Lynas

#90. The origin of agriculture involved both human intentionality and a set of underlying ecological and evolutionary principles.

Kent V. Flannery

#91. We instinctively fear snakes, but we appear not to be afraid of fast cars, which are a real danger now. This suggests our emotions were shaped by our evolutionary environment not the one we grew up in.

Steven Pinker

#92. During half a century of literary work, I have endeavoured to introduce the philosophy of evolution into the sphere of literature, and to inspire my readers to think in evolutionary terms.

Johannes Vilhelm Jensen

#93. Human intelligence is a function of man's evolutionary urge; the scientist and the philosopher hunger for truth because they are tired of being merely human.

Colin Wilson

#94. It called to mind something ancient, something pre-evolutionary, or else perhaps a mark of photosynthesis, and he realized to his surprise that there was nothing at all sexual about it; it was more vegetal than sexual.

Han Kang

#95. Human emotions have deep evolutionary roots, a fact that may explain their complexity and provide tools for clinical practice.
The Nature of Emotions (2001)

Robert Plutchik

#96. I believe that architecture, as anything else in life, is evolutionary. Ideas evolve; they don't come from outer space and crash into the drawing board.

Bjarke Ingels

#97. A text is evolutionary by its very nature.

Reif Larsen

#98. Evolutionary biologists tell us we have a "negativity bias" that makes our brains remember negative events more strongly than positive ones. So when we're feeling lost or discouraged, it can be very hard to conjure up memories and feelings of happiness and ease.

Sharon Salzberg

#99. Love, I have always known, is an evolutionary trait. It is a delicately tuned, intricate, sensitive impulse, but a trait nevertheless, a reaction honed by millions of years of an ever-changing and complex mating instinct.

David Bajo

#100. From an evolutionary perspective children are, literally, designed to learn. Childhood is a special period of protected immaturity. It gives the young breathing time to master the things they will need to know in order to survive as adults.

Alison Gopnik