Quotes About Evolutionary Biology

#1. 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

#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. The thing that upsets me is the ubiquitous use of reward technology, which uses our evolutionary biology against us.

Beeban Kidron

#4. Evolutionary biology is genuinely scientific, but more than that it opens the door to a world more marvellous than any Christian fundamentalist has ever read into the pages of the Bible.

Ambrose Bierce

#5. If I want to know how we learn and remember and represent the world, I will go to psychology and neuroscience. If I want to know where values come from, I will go to evolutionary biology and neuroscience and psychology, just as Aristotle and Hume would have, were they alive.

Patricia Churchland

#6. The evolution of sex is the hardest problem in evolutionary biology.

John Maynard Smith

#7. Some people will bring up evolutionary biology and apes, how female apes bow to male apes - that sort of thing. But the point is this: we are not apes. Apes also live in trees and eat earthworms. We do not.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. An agnostic Buddhist would not regard the Dharma as a source of answers to questions of where we came from, where we are going, what happens after death. He would seek such knowledge in the appropriate domains: astrophysics, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, etc.

Stephen Batchelor

#11. The irony, and inherent tension, of evolutionary biology is that this search for rational coherence - for "consilience," as Wilson likes to put it - arises as a natural consequence of the nature of evolutionary argument derived from essentially theological argument. This

Abigail Lustig

#12. In a high tech world the cure for the tragic shortcomings and perilous fallacies of human intuition is education, but education in economics, evolutionary biology, probability and statistics - unfortunately most High School and College curricula have barely changed since Medieval times!

Steven Pinker

#13. What's been gratifying is to live long enough to see molecular biology and evolutionary biology growing toward each other and uniting in research efforts.

E. O. Wilson

#14. The body is merely an evolutionary vehicle for the gene

Matt Ridley

#15. Homosexuality is neither a sin, nor an anomaly or a disease. It is an evolutionary variation.

Abhijit Naskar

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. Fear or anxiety is a normal part of living. It's the body's way of telling us something isn't right. It keeps us from harm's way and prepares us to act quickly in the face of danger.

Abhijit Naskar

#19. 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

#20. Now we see evolutionary trends in a variety of areas ranging from atomic and molecular physics through fluid mechanics, chemistry and biology to large scale systems of relevance in environmental and economic sciences

Ilya Prigogine

#21. 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

#22. Things to know from books to read

Kip Koehler

#23. It takes not a few centuries, or even millenniums, but millions of years for a subtle evolutionary change to become noticeable.

Abhijit Naskar

#24. Homosexuality is nature's way of keeping the population in check.

Abhijit Naskar

#25. I speculate that we shall come to accept the more radical idea that each one of our genes is a symbiotic unit. We are gigantic colonies of symbiotic genes.

Richard Dawkins

#26. Diversity is Nature's stronghold, yet that very diversity has become a curse for an entire species, which is supposedly the most advanced one on its planet.

Abhijit Naskar

#27. Evolutionarily speaking, love is all about procreation.

Abhijit Naskar

#28. The outgroup is rocks.

Joseph Felsenstein

#29. Faith is a natural evolutionary trait of the human mind, selected by Mother Nature as an internal coping-mechanism.

Abhijit Naskar

#30. 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

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

Steven Pinker

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

Anthony Marais

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

Abhijit Naskar