Quotes About Evolution

For a bunch of hairless apes, we've actually managed to invent some pretty incredible things.

There will always be men struggling to change, and there will always be those who are controlled by the past.

I had heard the same carols all my life, seen the same little play, with the same mistakes in grammar. The minister had offered the same prayer as always, Christmas or Sunday. The same people wore the same old clothes and sat in the same places. Next year it would be the same, and the year after that, the same again. Vivian said things were changing. But where were they changing?

It is, however, a most astonishing but incontestable fact, that the history of the evolution of man as yet constitutes no part of general education. Indeed, our so-called 'educated classes' are to this day in total ignorance of the most important circumstances and the most remarkable phenomena which Anthropogeny has brought to light.

An irrefutable proof that such single-celled primaeval animals really existed as the direct ancestors of Man, is furnished according to the fundamental law of biogeny by the fact that the human egg is nothing more than a simple cell.

Phylogenesis is the mechanical cause of ontogenesis.1 In other words, the development of the stem, or race, is, in accordance with the laws of heredity and adaptation, the cause of all the changes which appear in a condensed form in the evolution of the fœtus.

It's bad idea to try to prevent people from knowing their own history. If you want to do anything new you must first make sure you know what people have tried before.

Ontogenesis, or the development of the individual, is a short and quick recapitulation of phylogenesis, or the development of the tribe to which it belongs, determined by the laws of inheritance and adaptation.

We do not escape our boundaries or our innermost being. We do not change. It is true we may be transformed, but we always walk within our boundaries, within the marked-off circle.

Seen politically, systems follow one another, each consuming the previous one. They live on ever-bequeathed and ever-disappointed hope, which never entirely fades. Its spark is all that survives, as it eats its way along the blasting fuse. For this spark, history is merely an occasion, never a goal.

Wars are bound to occur from time to time. In them is manifested that determination of nature to intervene directly in the evolution of the greatest organisms of the earth, though they strive to withdraw themselves from her influence, and to break it forcibly upon their one-sided and purely economic aims.

Pero a menudo los textos eran jeroglíficos, hay así obras para las cuales no hemos madurado como lectores hasta hoy. Se asemejan a transparentes cuyos letreros son desvelados por el resplandor del mundo del fuego.

According to the concept of transformational evolution, first clearly articulated by Lamarck , evolution consists of the gradual transformation of organisms from one condition of existence to another.

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.

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 .

And it is this randomness of variation that is responsible for the enormous, often quite bizarre diversity of the living world.

No amphibian succeeded in adapting to salt water.

No one could have predicted that a defenseless, slow-moving biped should become the pinnacle of Creation.

Some insignificant and probably nocturnal mammals also survived and experienced in the Paleocene and Eocene a spectacular radiation, producing all the orders and many of the families of the now living mammals.

The final proof as to whether a certain habitat form has a genetic basis or is entirely phenotypical can be found only through experiments.

Therefore, it came as a terrible shock to the Victorian age when Darwin, following his theory of common descent, incorporated the human species into the animal kingdom as a descendant of primate ancestors.

To use the molecular clock in such a way requires the calibration of its "ticking rate.

The principle of adaptationism has been adopted so widely by Darwinians because it is such a heuristic methodology.

This uneven rate of evolution of different properties of an organism is called mosaic evolution , and it may create difficulties for classification.