Quotes About Evolution

An acquaintance had become a lover, might become a husband, but would retain all that she had noted in the acquaintance; and love must confirm an old relation rather than reveal a new one.

The only sense that is common in the long run, is the sense of change and we all instinctively avoid it.

At least the Pilgrim Fathers used to shoot Indians: the Pilgrim Children merely punch time clocks.

America makes prodigious mistakes, America has colossal faults, but one thing cannot be denied: America is always on the move. She may be going to Hell, of course, but at least she isn't standing still.

The ability of humans to speak a modern language and the evolution of our ability to think about ourselves thinking about ourselves thus appear to parallel each other.

In short, early Homo sapiens had adquired the cognitive ability to enter into a conversation with the gods, just as modern Homo sapiens does today.

a mature understanding of death appears to be one of the last milestones in the cognitive development and evolution of the human brain.

Mummy sighs. "We grew up, Dad," she says. "We grew up.

A work of art is never finished. It is merely abandoned.

Who could help anything? Not only in sex, but in all things men have moved blindly, have evolved out of slime to dissolve into it when this accident of consequences is over.

For me, the peculiar qualities of faith are a logical outcome of this level of biological organization.

Religious beliefs evolved by group-selection, tribe competing against tribe, and the illogic of religions is not a weakness but their essential strength.

The work on ants has profoundly affected the way I think about humans.

The evolutionary epic is probably the best myth we will ever have.

So in my freshman year at the University of Alabama, learning the literature on evolution, what was known about it biologically, just gradually transformed me by taking me out of literalism and increasingly into a more secular, scientific view of the world.

The biological evolutionary perception of life and of human qualities is radically different from that of traditional religion, whether it's Southern Baptist or Islam or any religion that believes in a supernatural supervalance over humanity.

The essence of humanity's spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another. Is there a way to erase the dilemma, to resolve the contradictions between the transcendentalist and the empiricist world views?

Theology made no provision for evolution. The biblical authors had missed the most important revelation of all! Could it be that they were not really privy to the thoughts of God?

If there is danger in the human trajectory, it is not so much in the survival of our own species as in the fulfillment of the ultimate irony of organic evolution: that in the instant of achieving self-understanding through the mind of man, life has doomed its most beautiful creations.

Big streams from little fountains flow. Great oaks from little acorns grow;

History is movement; and movement implies comparison.

It's a bad idea to try to prevent people from knowing their own history. If you want to do anything new you must first make sure you know what people have tried before.

the whole story of art is not a story of progress in technical proficiency, but a story of changing ideas and requirements.

The Ice Age lasted for an unimaginably long time. Many tens of thousands of years, which was just as well, for otherwise these people would not have had time to invent all these things. But gradually the earth grew warmer and the ice retreated to the high mountains, and people – who by now were much like us – learnt, with the warmth, to plant grasses and then grind the seeds to make a paste which they could bake in the fire, and this was bread.