Quotes About Darwinism

#1. A deep understanding of Darwinism teaches us to be wary of the easy assumption that design is the only alternative to chance

Richard Dawkins

#2. Darwinism is the story of humanity's liberation from the delusion that its destiny is controlled by a power higher than itself.

Anonymous

#3. No compelling data to support its anachronistic social Darwinism.

Stephen Jay Gould

#4. Evolution has no long-term goal. There is no long-distance target, no final perfection to serve as a criterion for selection, although human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution.

Richard Dawkins

#5. I believe the defenders of intelligent design deserve our gratitude for challenging a scientific world view that owes some of the passion displayed by its adherents precisely to the fact that it is thought to liberate us from religion. That world view is ripe for displacement ...

Thomas Nagel

#6. Darwinism is under official protection throughout the world. No other ideology in history, no other idea, has ever been kept under such strict official protection. To make any kind of statement criticizing Darwinism causes an official reaction.

Harun Yahya

#7. Vehicular Darwinism based on survival of the quickest.

Raymond L. Atkins

#8. Life cannot have had a random beginning ... The trouble is that there are about 2000 enzymes, and the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is only one part in 10^40,000, an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup.

Fred Hoyle

#9. For science, the end of the evolution struggle is simply represented by 'survival.' As for the means to that end, apparently anything goes. Darwinism leaves humanity without a moral compass.

Bruce Lipton

#10. Darwinism can be used to back up two mad moralities, but it cannot be used to back up a single sane one. The kinship and competition of all living creatures can be used as a reason for being insanely cruel or insanely sentimental; but not for a healthy love of animals.

G.K. Chesterton

#11. The notion that not only the biopolymer but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order.

Fred Hoyle

#12. 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

#13. He remembers that it was said to him, "Our ancestors were animal forms." But he does not remember that these forms were gods. This is the psychological basis for the emergence of Darwinism.

Rudolf Steiner

#14. After all, religion has been around a lot longer than Darwinism.

George W. Bush

#15. And evolution wasn't even properly invented until the late 1800s. Is that enough time to get a Labrador retriever from a dire wolf? I think not.

Bobby Henderson

#16. Shallow men believe in luck or in circumstance. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#17. That natural selection can produce changes within a type is disputed by no one, not even the staunchest creationist. But that it can transform one species into another - that, in fact, has never been observed.

Robert J. Sawyer

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

A.E. Samaan

#19. As the neo-cortex of the brain keeps getting more complex through further evolution, eventually our far away progeny will born in a world where there will be no more religion to be endowed upon them.

Abhijit Naskar

#20. The forces which are working out the great scheme of perfect happiness, taking no account of incidental suffering, exterminate such sections of mankind as stand in their way, with the same sternness that they exterminate beasts of prey and herds of useless ruminants.

Herbert Spencer

#21. None of this, of course, was ever stated: the genteel social Darwinism of the English middle classes always remained implicit.

Julian Barnes

#22. Experience and experiment are crucially important here - neural Darwinism is essentially experiential selection. The

Oliver Sacks

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. The predominant idea behind globalization, in its most virulent form, is an unpleasant kind of social Darwinism - that the world is for winners not losers, that only the successful count, that money is considerably more important than votes.

Anita Roddick

#26. Since the universe is stupid, it's no wonder that social Darwinism tends to support, promote and finance the evolution of fools.

William C. Brown

#27. Carnegie believed in the survival of the fittest. He believed in Social Darwinism. He believed that you had to give an opportunity to the fittest, who were going to survive, to the fittest to rise themselves as high as they could.

David Nasaw

#28. Social Darwinism had continued to flourish in German. Together with Mendelian genetics, it was widely thought to provide a scientific basis for the eugenic 'Racial Hygiene' movement.

Jonathan Glover

#29. If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.

Charles Darwin

#30. There is no way you can harmonize neo-Darwinism and Christianity.

Lee Strobel

#31. It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

Upton Sinclair

#32. Let us understand Darwinism so we can walk in the opposite direction when it comes to setting up society.

Richard Dawkins

#33. The perfect example of Darwinism is what technology has done to businesses.

Charlie Munger

#34. Darwinism's atheism prevents science from knowing why things are as they are. Without God there is no answer to the why for anything.

Dave Hunt

#35. I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially to the extent to which it has been applied, will be one of the greatest jokes in the history books of the future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity it has.

Malcolm Muggeridge

#36. Most accidents, I'm convinced, are God's way of getting rid of stupid people. Or if you believe in Darwinism, you wonder why there are any stupid people left in the world. Well, I guess they can reproduce before they remove themselves from the gene pool.

Nelson DeMille

#37. Reverse Darwinism: survival of the most idiotic.

Alan Grant

#38. 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

#39. Fear and Love are the two emotional pillars of survival.

Abhijit Naskar

#40. And there hasn't been much progress in Darwinism since [the life of Darwin].

Ben Stein

#41. Darwinism is not a sufficient condition for a phenomenon like Nazism but I think it's certainly a necessary one,

David Berlinski

#42. Each business is a victim of Digital Darwinism, the evolution of consumer behavior when society and technology evolve faster than the ability to exploit it. Digital Darwinism does not discriminate. Every business is threatened.

Brian Solis

#43. It wasn't that we started to look at things because there was now a mechanism by which to see them. There first had to be a will to see, buried somewhere inside living things. Without it, the mechanism would never have taken shape.

Koji Suzuki

#44. Progressively thinking biologists, both in our country and abroad, saw in Darwinism the only right road to the further development of scientific biology.

Trofim Lysenko

#45. There is no indisputable proof for the big bang," said Hollus. "And there is none for evolution. And yet you accept those. Why hold the question of whether there is a creator to a higher standard?

Robert J. Sawyer

#46. There was no intellectual movement in American history called social Darwinism. The people who were supposedly the leaders of the social Darwinist movement never embraced something called social Darwinism. It didn't exist.

Jonah Goldberg

#47. As far as design theorists are concerned, theistic evolution is American evangelicalism's ill-conceived accommodation to Darwinism .

William A. Dembski

#48. But I think schools also ought to be fair to all views. Because, frankly, Darwinism is not an established scientific fact. It is a theory of evolution, that's why it's called the theory of evolution.

Mike Huckabee

#49. Darwinism by itself did not produce the Holocaust, but without Darwinism ... neither Hitler nor his Nazi followers would have had the necessary scientific underpinnings to convince themselves and their collaborators that one of the worlds greatest atrocities was really morally praiseworthy.

Richard Weikart

#50. We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God.

Pope Benedict XVI

#51. Darwinism is a pagan religion whose roots go back to the Sumerians and Ancient Egypt.

Harun Yahya

#52. Darwinism may be a fine theory in other contexts, but in startups, intelligent design works best.

Peter Thiel

#53. 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

#54. The idea that one can go to the fossil record and expect to empirically recover an ancestor-descendant sequence, be it of species, genera, families, or whatever, has been, and continues to be, a pernicious illusion.

Gareth J. Nelson

#55. Nevertheless, it is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.

H.L. Mencken

#56. I wish he'd rushed out." "Always a sound policy." "I bet you never did." "More times than I can count. Which is why I'm still here, having dinner with you. The chaotic universe. Darwinism in action.

Lee Child

#57. But it is one of these sort of mythologies about America and its intellectual history, that the right embraced this thing called social Darwinism, when it never did so.

Jonah Goldberg

#58. 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

#59. Herbert Spencer is little read now. Philosophers do not regard him as a major thinker. Social Darwinism has long been in disrepute.

Peter Singer

#60. The fittest survive. What is meant by the fittest? Not the strongest; not the cleverest - weakness and stupidity everywhere survive. There is no way of determining fitness except in that a thing does survive. 'Fitness,' then, is only another name for 'survival.' Darwinism: That survivors survive.

Charles Fort

#61. Except for the rare cases of plastid inheritance, the inheritance of all known cofactors can be sufficiently accounted for by the presence of genes in the chromosomes. In a word the cytoplasm may be ignored genetically.

Thomas Hunt Morgan

#62. A growing number of respectable scientists are defecting from the evolutionist camp ... moreover, for the most part these "experts" have abandoned Darwinism, not on the basis of religious faith or biblical persuasions, but on strictly scientific grounds, and in some instances, regretfully.

Wolfgang Smith

#63. Journalism justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the vulgarist.

Oscar Wilde

#64. The Descent of Darwin: A Handbook of Doubts about Darwinism,

Errol White

#65. I was unaware that Darwinism was a race. - Mahir Gowda

Mira Grant

#66. The vulgarization of Darwinism that sees the "struggle for existence" as nothing but the competition for some environmental resource in short supply ignores the large body of evidence about the actual complexity of the relationship between organisms and their resources.

Richard Lewontin

#67. Evolutionism, as taught by Darwinism, has nothing - nothing - to say about how life originated. Has nothing to say about how the governing principles in the universe - gravity, thermodynamics, motion, fluid motion - how any of those originated. It's ... it's got some gigantic missing pieces.

Ben Stein

#68. In contrast to creation, Darwinism does not have a single piece of evidence demonstrating the theory of evolution. Its proponents don't have any fossil evidence, of the kind which they should be able to put forward.

Harun Yahya

#69. I am not satisfied that Darwin proved his point or that his influence in scientific and public thinking has been beneficial ... the success of Darwinism was accomplished by a decline in scientific integrity.

W. R. Thompson

#70. Darwinism is not merely a support for naturalistic philosophy: it is a product of naturalistic philosophy.

Phillip E. Johnson

#71. Darwinism as presented by Darwin contradicted idealistic philosophy, and this contradiction grew deeper with the development of its materialist teaching.

Trofim Lysenko

#72. Many of us have no grasp of quantum theory, or Einstein's theories of special and general relativity, but this does not in itself lead us to oppose these theories! Darwinism, unlike 'Einsteinism', seems to be regarded as fair game for critics with any degree of ignorance.

Richard Dawkins

#73. 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

#74. Darwinism is dynamic. It is about change, not stasis; about process, not pattern; about tales, not tableaux; about becoming, not being.

Henry Gee

#75. People still don't get how astounding Darwinism is. People think what shocked everybody was that Charles Darwin seemed to be saying we had descended from apes.

Stephen Fry

#76. Believers can have both religion and science as long as there is no attempt to make A non-A, to make reality unreal, to turn naturalism into supernaturalism. (125)

Michael Shermer

#77. Nothing seemed to offer more striking proof to the late Victorian mind of the infernal truth of social Darwinism than the supposed demise of the Tasmanian Aborigines.

Richard Flanagan

#78. Darwinism is still very much alive, utterly dominating biology. Despite the fact that no one has ever been able to prove the creation of a single distinct species by Darwinist means, Darwinism dominates the academy and the media.

Ben Stein

#79. 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

#80. Campaigning against religion can be socially counter-productive. If teachers take the uncompromising line that God and Darwinism are irreconcilable, many young people raised in a faith-based culture will stick with their religion and be lost to science.

Martin Rees

#81. 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

#82. There are people in the world who desperately want not to have to believe in Darwinism .

Richard Dawkins

#83. Darwinism doesn't explain where gravity comes from. It doesn't explain where thermodynamics comes from. It doesn't explain where the laws of physics come from. It doesn't explain where matter came from.

Ben Stein

#84. You'd think that people would have figured out by now that sticking a fork into the toaster is perhaps not the best idea. Oh well, score another point for Darwinism, I suppose.

Gary Whitta

#85. Darwinism did not strip meaning from the world but intensified it, 'by identifying it in as many aspects of life as possible'.

Neal Ascherson

#86. Considering the way the prebiotic soup is referred to in so many discussions of the origin of life as an already established reality, it comes as something of a shock to realize that there is absolutely no positive evidence for its existence.

Michael Denton

#87. It is impossible for a person who fears Allah to commit terrorist acts because of his faith. Such acts are committed by people who were educated abroad, who received a Darwinist education and who internalized Darwinism, but who later called themselves Muslims.

Harun Yahya

#88. New mutations don't create new species; they create offspring that are impaired.

Lynn Margulis

#89. 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

#90. 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

#91. Of all the problems which will have to be faced in the future, in my opinion, the most difficult will be those concerning the treatment of the inferior races of mankind.

Leonard Darwin

#92. And yet, strange to say, now that the truth [of natural selection] is recognized by most cultivated people ... now more than ever, in the history of the world, are they doing all they can to further the survival of the unfittest.

Herbert Spencer

#93. Verbal arguments should always be suspect.

Lee Spetner

#94. I swear his looks are pure Darwinism. If he wasn't so cute, someone would have killed him for being annoying by now.

Emery Lord

#95. It is almost as if the human brain were specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism, and to find it hard to believe

Richard Dawkins

#96. People have accused me of many things: racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, intolerance, anti-Darwinism and anti-homosexualism [sic]. Well, I tell those people that there was someone else who was accused of things ... our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. I rest my case.

Jerry Falwell

#97. Darwinism has become our culture's official creation myth, protected by a priesthood as dogmatic as any religious curia.

Nancy Pearcey

#98. 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

#99. Blind metaphysical necessity, which is certainly the same always and every where, could produce no variety of things. All that diversity of natural things which we find suited to different times and places could arise from nothing but the ideas and will of a Being, necessarily existing.

Isaac Newton

#100. 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