Quotes About Evolution

The stamp of the lowly origin is to be found in our appendix, in the now needless coat of hair that we still grow (and then shed) after five months in the womb, in our easily worn-out knees, our vestigial tails, and the many caprices of our urinogenital arrangements. Why do people keep saying, "God is in the details"? He isn't in ours, unless his yokel creationist fans wish to take credit for his clumsiness, failure, and incompetence.

Religious faith is, precisely because we are still-evolving creatures, ineradicable. It will never die out, or at least not until we get over our fear of death, and of the dark, and of the unknown, and of each other.

Religion was our first attempt at philosophy, just as alchemy was our first attempt at chemistry and astrology our first attempt to make sense of the movements of the heavens.

If god really wanted people to be free of such thoughts, he should have taken more care to invent a different species.

Hegel said that history was the story of freedom becoming conscious of itself.

However, only the most naive utopian can believe that this new humane civilization will develop, like some dream of "progress," in a straight line. We have first to transcend our prehistory, and escape the gnarled hands which reach out to drag us back to the catacombs and the reeking altars and the guilty pleasures of subjection and abjection.

There is an intriguing paradox here: evolution does not have eyes but it can create them.

Evolution, he said, is smarter than you are. But this compliment to the intelligence of natural selection is not by any means a concession to the stupid notion of intelligent design. Some of the results are extremely impressive, as we are bound to think in our own case. ... But the process by which the results are attained is slow and infinitely laborious, and has given us a DNA string which is crowded with useless junk and which has much in common with much lower creatures.

I myself hope to live long enough to graduate from being a 'bad boy,' which I once was, to becoming a curmudgeon....

We now know things about our nature that the founders of religion could not even begin to guess at, and that would have stilled their overconfident tongues if they had known of them. Yet again, once one has disposed of superfluous assumptions, speculation about who designed us to be designers becomes as fruitless and irrelevant as the question of who designed that designer.

Christianity is too repressed to offer sex in paradise—indeed it has never been able to evolve a tempting heaven at all—but it has been lavish in its promise of sadistic and everlasting punishment for sexual backsliders, which is nearly as revealing in making the same point in a different way.

Staring and staring into the mirror, it sees many faces within its face - the face of the child, the boy, the young man, the not-so-young man - all present still, preserved like fossils on superimposed layers, and, like fossils, dead. Their message to this live dying creature is: Look at us - we have died - what is there to be afraid of?It answers them: But that happened so gradually, so easily. I'm afraid of being rushed." Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man

The best we can do is take the history we have and deal with it.

The prospect of change is a many-fanged beast, my dear.

If you come to a river and find a boat at the edge, you will use that boat and it will serve you well, but once across the river, do you put the boat on your shoulders and carry it with you on the rest of your journey?

If you're going to learn, you need to forget what you know.

Ninety-five percent of all the species that have ever existed are now extinct, so don't look so goddamn smug. —GERARD RYDER

Losers can only flourish until a dominant species appears

Your soul may be more evolved than you are right now. If a kid fails tenth grade, do you make him repeat grades K through nine?" "No, I guess not." "No, you just make him start over at the beginning of tenth grade. Well, it's the same with souls. They only ascend. A person gets a soul when they can carry it to the next level, when they are ready to learn the next lesson.

While Alpha Males are often gifted with superior physical attributes—size, strength, speed, good looks—selected by evolution over the eons by the strongest surviving and, essentially, getting all the girls, the Beta Male gene has survived not by meeting and overcoming adversity, but by anticipating and avoiding it.

Yeah, and there's sort of a progression going back to the fifties: Bubbles, Boom Boom, and Blaze begat Bambi, Candy, and Jewel, who begat Sunshine, Brandy, and Cinnamon, who begat Amber, Brittany, and Brie, who begat Reagan, Morgan, and Madison. Madison is a stripper name.

How much humanity has been spoiled for the confusion of movement with progress, my friend?

The Beta Male is seldom the strongest or the fastest, but because he can anticipate danger, he far outnumbers his Alpha Male competition. The world is led by Alpha Males, but the machinery of the world turns on the bearings of the Beta Male.

there's sort of a progression going back to the fifties: Bubbles, Boom Boom, and Blaze begat Bambi, Candy, and Jewel, who begat Sunshine, Brandy, and Cinnamon, who begat Amber, Brittany, and Brie, who begat Reagan, Morgan, and Madison. Madison is a stripper name.