Evolution Quotes - Page 20

• The monkey is an organized sarcasm upon the human race.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Sarcasm, Science, Race

  Henry Ward Beecher, William Drysdale (1887). “Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit”

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• The most consequential change in man's view of the world, of living nature and of himself came with the introduction, over a period of some 100 years beginning only in the 18th century, of the idea of change itself, of change over periods of time: in a word, of evolution.

  Ernst Mayr

  Nature, Science, Men

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• The neutral zone of selective advantage in the neighbourhood of zero is thus so narrow that changes in the environment, and in the genetic constitution of species, must cause this zone to be crossed and perhaps recrossed relatively rapidly in the course of evolutionary change, so that many possible gene substitutions may have a fluctuating history of advance and regression before the final balance of selective advantage is determined.

  Ronald Fisher

  Zero, Science, Balance

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• The ordinary naturalist is not sufficiently aware that when dogmatizing on what species are, he is grappling with the whole question of the organic world & its connection with the time past & with Man; that it involves the question of Man & his relation to the brutes, of instinct, intelligence & reason, of Creation, transmutation & progressive improvement or development. Each set of geological questions & of ethnological & zool. & botan. are parts of the great problem which is always assuming a new aspect.

  Charles Lyell

  Science, Past, Men

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• As I have already urged, the practice of that which is ethically best - what we call goodness or virtue - involves a course of conduct which, in all respects, is opposed to that which leads to success in the cosmic struggle for existence. In place of ruthless selfassertion it demands self-restraint; in place of thrusting aside, or treading down, all competitors, it requires that the individual shall not merely respect , but shall help his fellows. It repudiates the gladiatorial theory of existence. Laws and moral precepts are directed to the end of curbing the cosmic process.

  Thomas Huxley

  Struggle, Science, Self

  "Evolution And Ethics".

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• The Primal Plant is going be the strangest creature in the world, which Nature herself must envy me. With this model and the key to it, it will be possible to go on for ever inventing plants and know that their existence is logical; that is to say, if they do not actually exist, they could, for they are not the shadowy phantoms of a vain imagination, but possess an inner necessity and truth. The same law will be applicable to all other living organisms.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Science, Law, Keys

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• The puritanical potentialities of science have never been forecast. If it evolves a body of organized rites, and is established as a religion, hierarchically organized, things more than anything else will be done in the name of 'decency.' The coarse fumes of tobacco and liquors, the consequent tainting of the breath and staining of white fingers and teeth, which is so offensive to many women, will be the first things attended to.

  Wyndham Lewis

  Science, Names, White

  1926 The Art of Being Ruled.

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• The question now at issue, whether the living species are connected with the extinct by a common bond of descent, will best be cleared up by devoting ourselves to the study of the actual state of the living world, and to those monuments of the past in which the relics of the animate creation of former ages are best preserved and least mutilated by the hand of time.

  Charles Lyell

  Science, Past, Issues

  Sir Charles Lyell (1863). “The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man: With Remarks on Theories of the Origin of Species by Variation”, p.470

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• The real question is, Did God use evolution as His plan? If it could be shown that man, instead of being made in the image of God, is a development of beasts we would have to accept it, regardless of its effort, for truth is truth and must prevail. But when there is no proof we have a right to consider the effect of the acceptance of an unsupported hypothesis.

  William Jennings Bryan

  Real, Science, Acceptance

  "God and Evolution". The New York Times, February 26, 1922.

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• The secrets of evolution are death and time-the deaths of enormous numbers of lifeforms that were imperfectly adapted to the environment; and time for a long succession of small mutations.

  Carl Sagan

  Science, Numbers, Long

  Carl Sagan (2011). “Cosmos”, p.49, Ballantine Books

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• The stars are laboratories in which the evolution of matter proceeds in the direction of large molecules.

  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

  Stars, Science, Molecules

  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (2015). “The Phenomenon of Man”, p.21, Lulu Press, Inc

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• The tree of life should perhaps be called the coral of life, base of branches dead; so that passages cannot be seen-this again offers contradiction to constant succession of germs in progress.

  Charles Darwin

  Science, Tree, Progress

  Charles Darwin, Thomas F. Glick, David Kohn (1996). “On Evolution: The Development of the Theory of Natural Selection”, p.54, Hackett Publishing

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• The University of Cambridge, in accordance with that law of its evolution, by which, while maintaining the strictest continuity between the successive phases of its history, it adapts itself with more or less promptness to the requirements of the times, has lately instituted a course of Experimental Physics.

  James Clerk Maxwell

  Science, Discovery, Law

  James Clerk Maxwell, Elizabeth Garber, Stephen G. Brush, C. W. Francis Everitt (1986). “Maxwell on Molecules and Gases”, p.111, MIT Press

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• There are as many species as the infinite being created diverse forms in the beginning, which, following the laws of generation, produced many others, but always similar to them: therefore there are as many species as we have different structures before us today.

  Carl Linnaeus

  Science, Law, Different

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• 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.

  Charles Darwin

  Science, Survival, Would Be

  Charles Darwin (1869). “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: Or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”, p.92

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• This spontaneous emergence of order at critical points of instability, which is often referred to simply as "emergence," is one of the hallmarks of life. It has been recognized as the dynamic origin of development, learning, and evolution. In other words, creativity-the generation of new forms-is a key property of all living systems.

  Fritjof Capra

  Life, Learning, Creativity

  Fritjof Capra, Ugo Mattei (2015). “The Ecology of Law: Toward a Legal System in Tune with Nature and Community”, p.97, Berrett-Koehler Publishers

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• This survival of the fittest implies multiplication of the fittest.

  Herbert Spencer

  Science, Survival, Multiplication

  'Principles of Biology' (1865) pt. 3, ch. 12, 164.

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• 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

  Science, Long, Limits

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• To produce a really good biological theory one must try to see through the clutter produced by evolution to the basic mechanisms lying beneath them, realizing that they are likely to be overlaid by other, secondary mechanisms. What seems to physicists to be a hopelessly complicated process may have been what nature found simplest, because nature could only build on what was already there.

  Francis Crick

  Nature, Lying, Science

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• Uniformity and Evolution are one.

  Charles Lapworth

  Science, Uniformity

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• Unity of plan everywhere lies hidden under the mask: of diversity of structure-the complex is everywhere evolved out of the simple.

  Thomas Huxley

  Lying, Science, Simple

  Thomas Henry Huxley (1872). “Lay Sermons, Addresses, and Reviews”, p.101

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• We are the accidental result of an unplanned process ... the fragile result of an enormous concatenation of improbabilities, not the predictable product of any definite process.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Science, Process, Results

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• We have really, that I know of, no philosophical basis for high and low. Moreover, the vegetable kingdom does not culminate, as the animal kingdom does. It is not a kingdom, but a common-wealth; a democracy, and therefore puzzling and unaccountable from the former point of view.

  Asa Gray

  Philosophical, Science, Animal

  Asa Gray (1973). “Letters of Asa Gray”

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• We may... have to relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that changes of paradigm carry scientists and those who learn from them closer and closer to the truth... The developmental process described in this essay has been a process of evolution from primitive beginnings-a process whose successive stages are characterized by an increasingly detailed and refined understanding of nature. But nothing that has been or will be said makes it a process of evolution toward anything.

  Thomas Kuhn

  Nature, Science, Understanding

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• We see not only thought as participating in evolution as an anomaly or as an epiphenomenon; but evolution as so reducible to and identifiable with a progress towards thought that the movement of our souls expresses and measures the very stages of progress of evolution itself. Man discovers that he is nothing else than evolution become conscious of itself.

  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

  Science, Men, Soul

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