Top 100 Quotes About Evolution Darwin
#1. 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
#2. It is a total mystery how we evolved minds capable of piloting cars through wild maneuvers using a wrist to steep while shouting at a cell phone. The creationists are fools for focusing on animal evolution. Darwin explains nature! He has more difficulty explaining us.
David Brin
#3. It is curious how there seems to be an instinctive disgust in Man for his nearest ancestors and relations. If only Darwin could conscientiously have traced man back to the Elephant or the Lion or the Antelope, how much ridicule and prejudice would have been spared to the doctrine of Evolution.
Havelock Ellis
#4. He who believes that each being has been created as we now see it, must occasionally have felt surprise when he has met with an animal having habits and structure not at all in agreement.
Charles Darwin
#5. The law of evolution is that the strongest survives!' 'Yes, and the strongest, in the existence of any social species, are those who are most social. In human terms, most ethical ... There is no strength to be gained from hurting one another. Only weakness.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#6. 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
#7. To suppose that the eye could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree
Charles Darwin
#8. Darwin's Theory of Evolution is the worst way to explain the mysteries of life, except for Creationism.
Roberto Quaglia
#10. Indeed, not all attacks - especially the bitter and ridiculing kind leveled at Darwin - are offered in good faith, but for practical purposes it is good policy to assume that they are.
Hans Selye
#11. 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
#12. 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
#14. What may be less familiar is the idea that the evolution of the conventions of our language might involve what Charles Darwin called "artificial selection.
Daniel Cloud
#15. When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled.
Charles Darwin
#16. Even if not a single fossil has ever been found, the evidence from surviving animals would still overwhelmingly force the conclusion that Darwin was right.
Richard Dawkins
#17. 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
#18. The expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient.
Charles Darwin
#19. The facts of variability, of the struggle for existence, of adaptation to conditions, were notorious enough; but none of us had suspected that the road to the heart of the species problem lay through them, until Darwin and Wallace dispelled the darkness.
Thomas Henry Huxley
#20. It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change.
Leon C. Megginson
#21. I first became aware of Charles Darwin and evolution while still a schoolboy growing up in Chicago. My father and I had a passion for bird-watching, and when the snow or the rain kept me indoors, I read his bird books and learned about evolution.
James D. Watson
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. Darwinism is dynamic. It is about change, not stasis; about process, not pattern; about tales, not tableaux; about becoming, not being.
Henry Gee
#25. 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
#26. In fact the a priori reasoning is so entirely satisfactory to me that if the facts won't fit in, why so much the worse for the facts is my feeling.
Erasmus Darwin
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. Today Charles Darwin is best known for establishing the fact of evolution and for recognizing the major role of natural selection in driving it.
Jared Diamond
#30. Darwin was a dreamer, I can assure you. No evolution or anything of the sort. For every one who can reason, I have to battle with nine orangutans.
Don Anacleto
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#31. This survival of the fittest which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr. Darwin has called 'natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.
Herbert Spencer
#32. This survival of the fittest implies multiplication of the fittest.
{The phrase 'survival of the fittest' was not originated by Charles Darwin, though he discussed Spencer's 'excellent expression' in a letter to Alfred Russel Wallace (Jul 1866).}
Herbert Spencer
#33. The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin.
Henry Adams
#34. The man that created the theory of evolution by natural selection was thrown out by his Dad because he wanted him to be a doctor. GAWD, parents haven't changed much.
Charles Darwin
#35. Among the most important things to remember about evolution - and about its primary mechanism, natural selection, as limned by Darwin and his successors - is that it doesn't have purposes. It only has results. To
David Quammen
#36. Often a cold shudder has run through me, and I have asked myself whether I may have not devoted myself to a fantasy.
Charles Darwin
#37. Agricultural practice served Darwin as the material basis for the elaboration of his theory of Evolution, which explained the natural causation of the adaptation we see in the structure of the organic world. That was a great advance in the knowledge of living nature.
Trofim Lysenko
#38. 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
#39. Darwin's theory of evolution pointed to the conclusion that flux (or becoming), not being, is the essence of reality. Though
Henri Bergson
#40. The evolution of the human race will not be accomplished in the ten thousand years of tame animals, but in the million years of wild animals, because man is, and always will be, a wild animal.
Charles Galton Darwin
#41. This new consensus seemed so compelling that Ernst Mayr, the dean of modern Darwinians, opened the ashcan of history for a deposit of Geoffrey's ideas about anatomical unity.
Stephen Jay Gould
#42. 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
#43. One hand has surely worked throughout the universe.
Charles Darwin
#44. If Charles Darwin reappeared today, he might be surprised to learn that humans are descended from viruses as well as from apes.
Robin A. Weiss
#45. 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
#46. A remarkable parallel, which I think has never been noticed, obtains between the facts of social evolution on the one hand, and of zological evolution as expounded by Mr. Darwin on the other.
William James
#47. Darwin matters because evolution matters. Evolution matters because science matters. Science matters because it is the preeminent story of our age, an epic saga about who we are, where we came from and where we are going.
Michael Shermer
#48. Natural selection rendered evolution scientifically intelligible: it was this more than anything else which convinced professional biologists like Sir Joseph Hooker, T. H. Huxley and Ernst Haeckel.
Charles Darwin
#49. 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
#50. Mr. Darwin ... has failed to hold definitely before his mind the principle that the difference of sex, whatever it may consist in, must itself be subject to natural selection and to evolution.
Antoinette Brown Blackwell
#51. Man is developed from an ovule, about 125th of an inch in diameter, which differs in no respect from the ovules of other animals.
Charles Darwin
#52. The embryological record is almost always abbreviated in accordance with the tendency of nature (to be explained on the principle of survival of the fittest) to attain her needs by the easiest means.
Francis Maitland Balfour
#53. A century ago, people laughed at the notion that we were descended from monkeys. Today, the individuals most offended by that claim are the monkeys.
Jacob M. Appel
#54. Charles Darwin viewed the fossil record more as an embarrassment than as an aid to his theory ...
Stephen Jay Gould
#55. 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
#56. One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.
Charles Darwin
#57. Science can neither prove nor disprove Scripture; it can hope only to begin to understand it.
Ron Brackin
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. Wilberforce did not believe in either evolution or extinction.
Owen believed in extinction but not evolution.
Lamarck believed in evolution but not extinction.
Darwin believed in evolution and extinction.
All four of them believed in God.
Sara Maitland
#61. 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
#62. Darwin didn't walk around the Galapagos and come up with the theory of evolution. He was exploring, collecting, making observations. It wasn't until he got back and went through the samples that he noticed the differences among them and put them in context.
Craig Venter
#63. 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
#64. Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more difficult
at least I have found it so
than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind.
Charles Darwin
#65. 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
#66. A grain in the balance will determine which individual shall live and which shall die - which variety or species shall increase in number, and which shall decrease, or finally become extinct.
Charles Darwin
#67. 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
#68. My theory of evolution is that Darwin was adopted.
Steven Wright
#69. 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
#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. In my simplicity, I remember wondering why every gentleman did not become an ornithologist.
Charles Darwin
#72. Till o'er the wreck, emerging from the storm, Immortal Nature lifts her changeful form: Mounts from her funeral pyre on wings of flame, And soars and shines, another and the same.
Erasmus Darwin
#73. To put it simply, no Darwin, no Hitler. Hitler tried to speed up evolution, to help it along, and millions suffered and died in unspeakable ways because of it.
D. James Kennedy
#74. By the age of 11, I was no longer going to Sunday Mass, and going on birdwatching walks with my father. So early on, I heard of Charles Darwin. I guess, you know, he was the big hero. And, you know, you understand life as it now exists through evolution.
James D. Watson
#75. It is difficult to believe in the dreadful but quiet war lurking just below the serene facade of nature.
Charles Darwin
#76. Although I am fully convinced of the truth of Evolution, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists. But I look with confidence to the future naturalists, who will be able to view both sides with impartiality.
Charles Darwin
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. The great CREATOR of all things has infinitely diversified the works of his hands, but has at the same time stamped a certain similitude on the features of nature, that demonstrates to us, that the whole is one family of one parent.
Erasmus Darwin
#80. Satan is behind the theory of evolution. Satan hates God and us. Satan is the father of all lies. So he wants nothing more than to make every human being alive believe lies about God, ourselves and how and why we exist.
Lisa Bedrick
#81. Darwinian evolution has obviously not had enough time to work.
George Hammond
#82. Along with William Shakespeare and Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin is Britain's greatest gift to the world. He was our greatest thinker.
Richard Dawkins
#83. Darwin recognized the fact that paleontology then seemed to provide evidence against rather for evolution in general or the gradual origin of taxonomic categories in particular.
George Gaylord Simpson
#84. Nowhere was Darwin able to point to one bona fide case of natural selection having actually generated evolutionary change in nature ... Ultimately, the Darwinian theory of evolution is no more nor less than the great cosmogenic myth of the twentieth century.
Michael Denton
#85. A grand and almost untrodden field of inquiry will be opened, on the causes and laws of variation, on correlation of growth, on the effects of use and disuse, on the direct actions of external conditions, and so forth.
Charles Darwin
#86. Stephen Hawking said that his quest is simply "trying to understand the mind of God".
Stephen Hawking
#87. Evolution was far more thrilling to me than the biblical account. Who would not rather be a rising ape than a falling angel? To my juvenile eyes, Darwin was proved true every day. It doesn't take much to make us flip back into monkeys again.
Terry Pratchett
#88. 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
#89. Evolution on the large scale unfolds, like much of human history, as a succession of dynasties.
Edmund Beecher Wilson
#90. 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
#91. Not to take this web of dualities as a sign we are on the right track would be a bit like believing that God put fossils into the rocks in order to mislead Darwin about the evolution of life.
Stephen Hawking
#92. The formation of different languages and of distinct species and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are curiously parallel.
Charles Darwin
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. Evolution, thus, is merely contingent on certain processes articulated by Darwin: variation and selection. No longer is a fixed object transformed, as in transformational evolution, but an entirely new start is, so to speak, made in every generation.
Ernst W. Mayr
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. A major fault, for example, is the fact that, along with the materialist principle, Darwin introduced into his theory of evolution reactionary Malthusian ideas.
Trofim Lysenko
#100. 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
