Quotes About Evolution

I don't think that evolution is supremely important because it is my specialty; it is my specialty because I think it is supremely important. [In: Edward J. Larson (2004) Evolution, Modern Library. p. 250]

If a sect does officially insist that its structure of belief demands that evolution be false, then no compromise is possible. An honest and competent biology teacher can only conclude that the sect's beliefs are wrong and that its religion is a false one.

Species evolve exactly as if they were adapting as best they could to a changing world, and not at all as if they were moving toward a set goal.

It is mankind that has survived, not any one man. The fitness includes and depends on social organization, cooperation.

Over and over again in the study of the history of life it appears that what can happen does happen. There is little suggestion that what occurs must occur, that it was fated or that it follows some fixed plan, except simply as the expansion of life follows the opportunities that are presented. In this sense, an outstanding characteristic of evolution is its opportunism.["Meaning of Evolution," 1949, p. 160.]

Eight years had passed. Everything about me had changed, but I was still in love with Derek Gaunt.

Adapt or die," Helen said. "It's impossible to stop change," Maud said. "It's the nature of life. Those who refuse to adapt will eventually die out. But before they do, they will get nasty. They might even hate you.

The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters

Why do you vomit when you see and smell somebody else vomit?" "I don't know." "It's a biological survival mechanism. Primitive humans existed in family groups. They slept in the same place and they ate the same things." Pieces clicked together in my head. "So, if one person vomited, they likely got poisoned, so everyone needed to vomit to not die.

I was mourning the old me. For the new me to emerge, the old me had to disappear, and killing her bit by bit hurt.

This is life," Luther said. "We change, we alter ourselves, we grow or shrink. It's part of the human condition.

It doesn't matter what you were. It matters what you are now.

it exhibited reanimative metamorphosis. It was dead and instead of staying dead, it turned into something else and came back to life. It also went cross-phylum, from mammal to insect. That means there is a good chance it might come back to life again as something really strange, like a terrestrial octopus shooting lightning from its tentacles.

Life changes us. To wish otherwise is pointless.

Since the human race's natural end is to make steady cultural progress, its moral end is to be conceived as progressing toward the better. And this progress may well be occasionally interrupted, but it will never be broken off.

Coloro che dicono che il mondo andrà sempre così come è andato finora contribuiscono a far sì che l'oggetto della loro predizione si avveri

We are, indeed, fully prepared to believe that the bearing of children may and ought to become as free from danger and long debility to the civilized woman as it is to the savage. —Thomas Huxley

our bodies must work pretty well, or there wouldn't be so many humans on the planet.

Quanto bisogna aver vissuto, per poter scoprire tratti umani nei nostri genitori o insegnanti! E, probabilmente, pensava, l'intera esistenza consiste in questo lento cambiamento di prospettiva.

Os acontecimentos graves, felizes ou infelizes, não alteram a alma de um homem, mas precisam-na, tal como uma rajada de vento revela a forma de uma árvore ao varrer num ápice as folhas mortas; trazem para a luz aquilo que estava relegado na sombra; inclinam o espírito na direcção em que passará a crescer.

She did not want to be as before. She wanted great changes in her life.

I'm sorry, I'm not myself. Or rather I am myself, my new self.

All was movement, all was change, and somehow this was visible and yet unimaginable.

They haven't been standing still in the past.