Quotes About Evolution

Slowly the increasing complexity of tools and trades subjected the unskilled or weak to the skilled or strong; every invention was a new weapon in the hands of the strong, and further strengthened them in their mastery and use of the weak.

In agriculture the stick became the hoe; in war it became the lance or javelin or spear, the sword or bayonet.

25,000 B.C., the first of the postglacial industries, and the first known culture of Cro-Magnon Man. Bone tools—pins, anvils, polishers, etc.—were now added to those of stone; and art appeared in the form of crude engravings on the rocks, or simple figurines in high relief, mostly of nude women.

struggle is the indispensable accompaniment of progress

If men were entirely social, man would stagnate; a certain alloy of individualism and competition is required to make the human species survive and grow.

Society is a growth in time, not a syllogism in logic; and when the past is put out through the door it comes in at the window.

Christianity did not destroy paganism; it adopted it.

Man's sins may be the relics of his rise rather than the stigmata of his fall.

Every civilization is a fruit from the sturdy tree of barbarism, and falls at the greatest distance from its trunk.

the development of the Christian ethic slowly eroded Christian theology. Christ destroyed Jehovah.

all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation.

Darwin furthered the transformation. As the astronomer had lost the Earth in space, the biologist lost man in the infinity of time, in the long procession of transitory species that had walked the earth or swum the sea or flown the air; man became a mere line in Nature's interminable odyssey. But it was Darwin, too, who opened a way to what John Morley called "the next great task of science—to create a new religion for humanity.

Education is the reason why we behave like human beings. We are hardly born human. We are born ridiculous, malodorous animals. We become human. We have humanity thrust upon us through the hundred channels whereby the past pours down into the present that mental and cultural inheritance--whose preservation, emulation, and transmission places mankind today, with all of its defectives and illiterates, on a higher plain than any generation has ever reached before.

La naturaleza ama la diferencia como material necesario para la selección y la evolución;

Probably every vice was once a virtue … Man's sins may be the relics of his rise rather than the stigmata of his fall.

Generaciones de hombres establecen un dominio creciente sobre la tierra, pero están destinados a convertirse en fósiles en su suelo.

Empedocles (fl. 445 B.C., in Sicily) developed to a further stage the idea of evolution.17 Organs arise not by design but by selection. Nature makes many trials and experiments with organisms, combining organs variously; where the combination meets environmental needs the organism survives and perpetuates its like; where the combination fails, the organism is weeded out; as time goes on, organisms are more and more intricately and successfully adapted to their surroundings.

The more things change, the more they remain the same.

Sumeria was to Babylonia, and Babylonia to Assyria, what Crete was to Greece, and Greece to Rome:

But how far has human nature changed in the course of history? Theoretically there must have been some change; natural selection has presumably operated upon psychological as well as upon physiological variations. Nevertheless, known history shows little alteration in the conduct of mankind.

pugnacity, greed, brutality, and sexual readiness were advantages in the struggle for existence. Probably every vice was once a virtue

we must not expect the world to improve much faster than ourselves

Oh, the future--it's always so fucking dated. For you, for me, for all of us. If only there were some way out of it.

In the memorable words of Professor Roy Baumeister, 'Life is change that yearns for stability