Quotes About Evolution

Long before he became well known for his atheism, Dawkins was famous for the ideas set out in his book The Selfish Gene.

Cities, marriage, language, music, art – these manifestations of culture all change in regular and retrospectively predictable ways, but in ways that nobody did predict, let alone direct. They evolve.

It makes more sense to see the body as serving the needs of the genes than vice versa. Bottom–up.

It follows a narrative, going from one stage to the next; it creeps rather than jumps; it has its own spontaneous momentum, rather than being driven from outside; it has no goal or end in mind; and it largely happens by trial and error – a version of natural selection.

the diagnostic feature of life is that it captures energy to create order. This is also a hallmark of civilisation.

Far more than we like to admit, the world is to a remarkable extent a self-organising, self-changing place.

Let's give a bit less credit to creationists, while we encourage and celebrate the evolution of everything.

If you think being descended from apes is bad for your self esteem, then get used to the idea that you are also descended from viruses.

Far from being choosy, female primates seemed to be initiators of much promiscuity. Hrdy began to suggest that there was something wrong with the theory rather than the females.

And by forcing ourselves to learn something, we place ourselves in a selective environment that puts a premium on a future instinctive solution to the problem. Thus, learning gradually gives way to instinct.

What if morality itself was not handed down from the Judeo-Christian God as a prescription? And was not even the imitation of a Platonic ideal, but was a spontaneous thing produced by social interaction among people seeking to find ways to get along?

Morality therefore emerged as a consequence of certain aspects of human nature in response to social conditions.

Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!

Most species do not change their habits during their few million years on earth or alter their lifestyle much in different parts of their range.

These new people had something special: they were not prisoners of their ecological niche, but could change their habits quite easily if prey disappeared, or better opportunities arose.

It is when we go beyond instinct that we seem most idiosyncratically human. Perhaps, as Darwin suggested, the difference is one of degree rather than kind; it is quantitative, not qualitative.

Female monkeys, unaware that they are slaves to cultural stereotypes, like things with faces. Male monkeys, unaware that they are doing the bidding of human sexists, like things with moving parts.

It is not confined to genetic systems, but explains the way that virtually all of human culture changes: from morality to technology, from money to religion.

As a result, whereas other primates have guts weighing four times their brains, the human brain weighs more than the human intestine. Cooking enabled hominids to trade gut size for brain size. Erectus

This turns out not to be true. Darwinian change is inevitable in any system of information transmission so long as there is some lumpiness in the things transmitted, some fidelity of transmission and a degree of randomness, or trial and error, in innovation. To say that culture 'evolves' is not metaphorical.

if life needs no intelligent designer, then why should the market need a central planner?

Free will was not created for fun; there was a reason that evolution handed our ancestors the ability to take initiatives (...) eventually to be in a better position to reproduce and rear children than human beings who do not reproduce.

We now know that Lamarckism cannot work because bodies are built from cakelike recipes, not architectural blueprints, and it is simply impossible to feed information back into the recipe by changing the cake.

in a sorry world there is no safety to be found in standing still.