The fact of evolution is the backbone of biology, and biology is thus in the peculiar position of being a science founded on an improved theory, is it then a science or faith?
In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God ... I think that generally (& more and more so as I grow older) but not always, that an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind.
Not one change of species into another is on record ... we cannot prove that a single species has been changed.
The normal food of man is vegetable.
Much love much trial, but what an utter desert is life without love.
A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn't there.
Even people who aren’t geniuses can outthink the rest of mankind if they develop certain thinking habits.
Such simple instincts as bees making a beehive could be sufficient to overthrow my whole theory.
It is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance.
Another source of conviction in the existence of God, connected with the reason and not with the feelings, impresses me as having much more weight. This follows from the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist.
At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state as we may hope, than the Caucasian and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.
Often a cold shudder has run through me, and I have asked myself whether I may have not devoted myself to a fantasy.
If every one were cast in the same mould, there would be no such thing as beauty.
With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. Hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
An agnostic would be the more correct description of my state of mind.
I never gave up Christianity until I was forty years of age.
Everything in nature is the result of fixed laws.
If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.
Free will is to mind what chance is to matter.
I am not apt to follow blindly the lead of other men
An American monkey, after getting drunk on brandy, would never touch it again, and thus is much wiser than most men.
Only the fittest will survive.
To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.
This preservation of favourable variations and the destruction of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest. Variations neither useful nor injurious would not be affected by natural selection and would be left a fluctuating element.
The question of whether there exists a Creator and Ruler of the Universe has been answered in the affirmative by some of the highest intellects that have ever existed.
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