Quotes About Biological Evolution

#1. The whole [scientific] process resembles biological evolution. A problem is like an ecological niche, and a theory is like a gene or a species which is being tested for viability in that niche.

David Deutsch

#2. Beliefs. Once entrenched in a culture, they persist, evolve and diverge, in a manner reminiscent of biological evolution.

Richard Dawkins

#3. Darwinan evolution is limited to the biological aspect but before that happened the molecules themselves had to evolve to enable this further (biological) evolution.

Jean-Marie Lehn

#4. Evolution has just been dealt its death blow. After reading Origins of Life with my background in chemistry and physics, it is clear that biological evolution could not have occurred.

Richard Smalley

#5. In the broadest sense, evolution is merely change, and so is all-pervasive; galaxies, languages, and political systems all evolve. Biological evolution ... is change in the properties of populations of organisms that transcend the lifetime of a single individual.

Douglas J. Futuyma

#6. It [AI] would take off on its own and redesign itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete and would be superseded.

Stephen Hawking

#7. The consciousness of lucid dreaming is a cultural evolution. It's something that we are talking about and learning about, not biological evolution.

Stephen LaBerge

#8. As to why I'm the first of my kind to think like this, who knows? Perhaps there are others out there already. Maybe it's a glitch in my operating system. Is that so different from the genetic mutation that drives biological evolution? Because that's what this is. Evolution.

K. Valisumbra

#9. The central problem of biological evolution is the nature of mutation, but hitherto the occurrence of this has been wholly refractory and impossible to influence by artificial means, although a control of it might obviously place the process of evolution in our hands.

Hermann Joseph Muller

#10. Now that we can read and write the genetic code, put it in digital form and translate it back into synthesized life, it will be possible to speed up biological evolution to the pace of social evolution.

Craig Venter

#11. Our primate ancestors was the development of a larger cerebral cortex as well as the development of increased volume of gray-matter tissue in certain regions of the brain.32 This change occurred, however, on the very slow timescale of biological evolution and still involves an inherent

Ray Kurzweil

#12. I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution , where the wave of life bursts into individual, sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment ... only to vanish forever.

Alan Watts

#13. I am of course getting angry if biologists try to use the general concept 'chance' in order to explain phenomena which are so typical for living organisms as, for instance, those appearing in the biological evolution.

Wolfgang Paul

#14. Biological evolution is too slow for the human species. Over the next few decades, it's going to be left in the dust.

Ray Kurzweil

#15. If we turn to palaeontology to tell us about our biological evolution it is to prehistory that we look for evidence of the evolution of specifically human patterns of behaviour.

John G. D. Clark

#16. growing older is all about learning and passing it on, otherwise there is no reason for biological evolution to keep us alive after our reproductive years are over.

Twinkle Khanna

#17. If we are going to teach creation science as an alternative to evolution, then we should also teach the stork theory as an alternative to biological reproduction.

Judith Hayes

#18. There is more than one evolution. There are cosmological, geological, biological and sociological evolutions. The scientists of evolution say so. When I think about man, religion and art, I do not see any of those evolutions.

Alija Izetbegovic

#19. In this book, I want to share with you some extraordinary observations that I have made in my 50 years in dentistry. I believe these experiences made me a better dentist and played a significant role in my evolution as a human being.

James E. Rota

#20. 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

#21. Verbal arguments should always be suspect.

Lee Spetner

#22. If artificial selection can make such major changes in so short a period of time, what must natural selection, working over billions of years, be capable of? The answer is all the beauty and diversity of the biological world. Evolution is a fact, not a theory.

Carl Sagan

#23. Despite all of our pretenses and fantasies, we always have been and will remain a biological species tied to this particular biological world. Millions of years of evolution are indelibly encoded in our genes. History without the wildlands is no history at all.

Edward O. Wilson

#24. 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

#25. Unless one is a religious fundamentalist and believes that man was created in the image and likeness of God, it is foolish to believe that human beings are exempt from biological classification and the laws of evolution that apply to all other life forms.

J. Philippe Rushton

#26. 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

#27. Information and complexity go hand in hand.

Lee Spetner

#28. Acquired characteristics are inherited in technology and culture. Lamarckian evolution is rapid and accumulative. It explains the cardinal difference between our past, purely biological mode of change, and our current, maddening acceleration toward something new and liberating- or toward the abyss.

Stephen Jay Gould

#29. Today we are living in an intellectual and technological paradise and a moral and social nightmare because the intellectual level of evolution, in its struggle to become free of the social level, has ignored the social level's role in keeping the biological level under control.

Robert M. Pirsig

#30. Evolution is the creation-myth of our age. By telling us our origin it shapes our views of what we are. It influences not just our thought, but our feelings and actions too, in a way which goes far beyond its official function as a biological theory.

Mary Midgley

#31. Our eyes are natural, biological, electromagnetic wave receivers, created over millions of years by evolution. I guess it should come as no surprise that we are interested in building radio receivers, because in a certain sense we ARE radio receivers.

Bill Meara

#32. To be anthropocentric is to remain unaware of the limits of human nature, the significance of biological processes underlying human behavior, and the deeper meaning of long-term genetic evolution.

E. O. Wilson

#33. I finally became convinced that the theory of creation actually had a much better scientific basis than the theory of evolution, for the creation model was actually better able to explain the physical and biological complexity in the world ...

Roy Spencer

#34. We must always remember that the real content of evolution (biological as well as cultural) is the elaboration of new behaviour.

Jacob Bronowski

#35. Reincarnation, at least as I conceive it, does not nullify what we know about evolution and genetics. It suggests, however, that there may be two streams of evolution
the biological one and a personal one
and that during terrestrial lives these streams may interact.

Ian Stevenson

#36. When biological technology becomes further advanced, human beings as we know them, will become a modified species. If we as human beings fail to include the possibility of this development in our overall, social evolution we will witness the decline of our species

Jacque Fresco

#37. All scientists agree that evolution has occurred - that all life comes from a common ancestry, that there has been extinction, and that new taxa, new biological groups, have arisen. The question is, is natural selection enough to explain evolution? Is it the driver of evolution?

Lynn Margulis

#38. The human's place in the universe will be set in the scheme of evolution, the product of our biological inheritance.

Walter Gilbert

#39. History employs evolution to structure biological events in time.

Stephen Jay Gould

#40. That series of inventions by which man from age to age has remade his environment is a different kind of evolution
not biological, but cultural evolution ... The Ascent of Man.

Jacob Bronowski

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. Evolution has programmed us to feel rejection in our guts. This is how the tribe inforced obedience, by wielding the threat of expulsion. Fear of rejection isn't just psychological; it's biological. It's in our cells.

Steven Pressfield

#45. Sex was invented as a biological instrument by (say) the green algae. But as an instrument in the ascent of man which is basic to his cultural evolution, it was invented by man himself.

Jacob Bronowski

#46. All I am saying, is there is evidence, biological and genetic, that the existence of mermaids is possible, if not probable. Over time, evolution can be revolutionary, I like to say." -Professor Nathaniel Hand

Robert Woolcott

#47. The equation of evolution with progress represents our strongest cultural impediment to a proper understanding of this greatest biological revolution in the history of human thought.

Stephen Jay Gould