Quotes About Evolution

Your family tree includes not just obvious cousins like chimpanzees and monkeys but also mice, buffaloes, iguanas, wallabies, snails, dandelions, golden eagles, mushrooms, whales, wombats and bacteria. All are our cousins. Every last one of them. Isn't that a far more wonderful thought than any myth?

With only a little imagination we can see the gene as sitting at the centre of a radiating web of extended phenotypic power.

There was something built into the human brain by natural selection which was once useful, and which now manifests itself as religion.

We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.* 12

Maybe scientists are fundamentalist when it comes to defining in some abstract way what is meant by 'truth'. But so is everybody else. I am no more fundamentalist when I say evolution is true than when I say it is true that New Zealand is in the southern hemisphere. We believe in evolution because the evidence supports it, and we would abandon it overnight if new evidence arose to disprove it.

Putting these three things together we arrive at our own 'central theorem' of the extended phenotype: An animal's behaviour tends to maximize the survival of the genes 'for' that behaviour, whether or not those genes happen to be in the body of the particular animal performing it.

if a design is good enough to evolve once, the same design principle is good enough to evolve twice, from different starting points, in different parts of the animal kingdom.

Should we then not expect lions to refrain from killing antelopes, 'for the good of the mammals'?

THE evidence for evolution grows by the day, and has never been stronger. At the same time, paradoxically, ill-informed opposition is also stronger than I can remember. This book is my personal summary of the evidence that the 'theory' of evolution is actually a fact – as incontrovertible a fact as any in science.

In the world of the extended phenotype, ask not how an animal's behaviour benefits its genes; ask instead whose genes it is benefiting.

O darwinismo é uma teoria de processos cumulativos tão lentos que se desenrolam ao longo de milhares e milhões de anos. Todos os nossos juízos intuitivos sobre o que é provável mostram-se errados por larga margem.

I should also give some space to Amotz Zahavi's idea that altruistic donation might be a 'Potlatch' style of dominance signal: see how superior to you I am, I can afford to make a donation to you!

Oricât de mult am vrea s? credem altcumva, iubirea universal? ÅŸi bun?starea tuturor speciilor laolalt? sunt, din punct de vedere evoluÅ£ionist, concepte f?r? sens.

The physicist's problem is the problem of ultimate origins and ultimate natural laws. The biologist's problem is the problem of complexity.

however many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead, or rather not alive. You may throw cells together at random, over and over again for a billion years, and not once will you get a conglomeration that flies or swims or burrows or runs, or does anything, even badly, that could remotely be construed as working to keep itself alive.

universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts that simply do not make evolutionary sense.

Los genes operan de manera misteriosa.

Evolution is a trajectory through multidimensional space, in which every step of the way has to represent a body capable of surviving and reproducing about as well as the parental type reached by the preceding step of the trajectory.

No sane creator, setting out from scratch to design a flat-fish, would have conceived on his drawing board the absurd distortion of the head needed to bring both eyes round to one side.

The currency used in the casino of evolution is survival, strictly gene survival, but for many purposes individual survival is a reasonable approximation.

We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination.

Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature.

Oh golly, Brer Fox, your forthright assertion—that evolutionary biology disproves the idea of a creator God—jeopardises the teaching of biology in science class, since teaching that would violate the separation of church and state!' Right. You also ought to soft-pedal physiology, since it declares virgin birth impossible

That scientifically savvy philosopher Daniel Dennett pointed out that evolution counters one of the oldest ideas we have: 'the idea that it takes a big fancy smart thing to make a lesser thing. I call that the trickle-down theory of creation.