Quotes About Evolution

Charles Darwin's well-known observation that the mental difference between humans and other animals is one of degree rather than kind.

The dominant hypothesis remains that we carry the mark of Cain. For example, in his 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature, the Canadian-American psycholinguist Steven Pinker proposed that humanity needs civilization to keep its destructive instincts under control. Since his theory works only if our forebears were hyperaggressive characters, Pinker went for the chimpanzee as ancestral model and cheerfully swept bonobos under the rug, calling them "very strange primates.

Gould was clearly the expert taxonomist, but it was Darwin who proposed the radical notion: Was it possible for a species of birds to split into two (or more) species if the birds were isolated on separate islands? This notion eventually became the basis for what may be considered the most significant scientific revolution of our time, the theory of evolution.

when the cost of believing a false pattern is real is less than the cost of believing the genuine pattern, natural selection will favor the false pattern.

In the World through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself.

They realize at last that change does not mean reform, that change does not mean improvement.

Ä°lkel ve soyutlanm?? kabileler bize stabil görünürler; çünkü rahat ve müdahale edilmeyen koÅŸullarda deÄŸiÅŸim oldukça yavaÅŸt?r.

Der Weg der neuen Bildung geht von Humanität durch Nationalität zur Bestialität.

Solo estamos en la edad de piedra del conocimiento de los animales y nuestra ignorancia al respecto sigue siendo enciclopédica. Por no mencionar los prejuicios ancestrales.

The surest way to stop growing is to stop reading.

If it doesn't challenge you, it doesn't change you.

I stopped predicting the future a long time ago.

It's amazing how, over time, a person's perspective can be altered.

W]hen one looks at females in nature, one sees industry, progenitiveness and efficiency; when one looks at males, one sees the most elaborate forms of wastefulness.

Things are the way they are because they were the way they were.

The notion that not only the biopolymer but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order.

What can it mean, 150 years after Darwin, to say that some species or communities are good and some are bad?

Often when you think you're at the end of something, you're at the beginning of something else.

Little by little we human beings are confronted with situations that give us more and more clues that we are not perfect.

A friend of mine was in a taxi in Washington, D.C., going slowly past the National Archives, when he noticed the words on the cornerstone of the building: "The past is prologue." He read them out loud to the taxi driver and said, "What do you think that means, 'The past is prologue'?" The taxi driver said, "I think it means, 'Man, you ain't seen nothin' yet!

To get somewhere new, we may have to leave somewhere else behind.

Little by little we human beings are confronted with situations that give us more and more clues that we aren't perfect.

Often when you think you're at the end of something, you're at the beginning of something else.

Who we are in the present includes who we were in the past.