Evolution Quotes

There was rarely an obvious branching point in a person's life. People changed slowly, over time. Yo...

Love only grows by sharing. You can only have more for yourself by giving it away to others.

Perhaps the locale of the subjunctive mood willone day be found. Will Latins turn out to be extravag...

The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.

The entire evolutionary record on our planet, particularly the record contained in fossil endocasts,...

How thoroughly the chimps and bonobos have erased the list of purported human distinctions!-self-awa...

Perhaps if one less dragonfly had drowned in the Carboniferous swamps, the intelligent organisms on ...

Civilization is a product of the cerebral cortex.

The fossil record implies trial and error, the inability to anticipate the future, features inconsis...

The secrets of evolution, are time and death. There's an unbroken thread that stretches from those f...

Pliny suggested that the ostrich, then newly discovered, was the result of a cross between a giraffe...

So far as I know, childbirth is generally painful in only one of the millions of species on Earth: h...

It may be that there are kernels of truth in a few of these doctrines, but their widespread acceptan...

Much more plausible is the computer-based explanation that dreams are a spillover from the unconscio...

at least some paleontologists believe that the demiseof the dinosaurs was accelerated by nocturnal p...

All the explanations proposed seem to beonly partly satisfactory. They range from massive climatic c...

This sort of information gathering is precisely what we call play. And the important function of pla...

For their surface area, insects weigh very little. A beetle, falling from a high altitude, quickly a...

Once intelligent beings achieve technology and the capacity for self-destruction of their species, t...

And despite the insignificance of the instant we have so far occupied in cosmic time, it is clear th...

Do dogs feel for humans something akin to religious ecstasy? What other strong or subtle emotions ar...

Natural selection has served as a kind of intellectual sieve, producing brains and intelligences inc...

The sleeping style of each organism is exquisitelyadapted to the ecology of the animal. It is concei...

When all is said and done, the invention of writing must be reckoned not only as a brilliant innovat...

the future belongs to those societies that treat new ideas as delicate, fragile and immensely valuab...

It is very difficult to evolve by altering the deep fabric of life; any change there is likely to be...

The time scale for evolutionary or genetic change is very long. A characteristic period for the emer...

Russell commented that the development of such gifted individuals (referring to polymaths) required ...

Our probable ancestors, Homo erectus and Homo habilis -now extinct- are classified as of the same ge...

Washburn has reported that infant baboons and other young primates appear to be born with only three...

Perhaps the most striking aspect of this entire subject is that there are nonhuman primates so close...

Significant change might require those who are now high in the hierarchy to move downward many steps...

Curiosity and the urge to solve problems are theemotional hallmarks of our species

One of the great commandments of science is, 'Mistrust arguments from authority'. (Scientists, being...

I think the discomfort that some people feel in going to the monkey cages at the zoo is a warning si...

Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.

But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has bee...

But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has bee...

To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different di...

A grand and almost untrodden field of inquiry will be opened, on the causes and laws of variation, o...

It is difficult to believe in the dreadful but quiet war lurking just below the serene facade of nat...

The affinities of all the beings of the same class have sometimes been represented by a great tree.I...

When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings wh...

But then arises the doubt, can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe been developed from a ...

I fully agree with all that you say on the advantages of H. Spencer's excellent expression of 'the s...

Origin of man now proved.—Metaphysics must flourish.—He who understands baboon would do more towards...

As the great botanist Bichat long ago said, if everyone were cast in the same mould, there would be ...

The following proposition seems to me in a high degree probable—namely, that any animal whatever, en...

He who believes that each being has been created as we now see it, must occasionally have felt surpr...

Man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence w...

For my own part I would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded ...

A grain in the balance will determine which individual shall live and which shall die - which variet...

Nothing at first can appear more difficult to believe than that the more complex organs and instinct...

Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more diffi...

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed int...

If about a dozen genera of birds had become extinct or were unknown, who would have ventured to have...

In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based ...

One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the s...

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of...

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by ...

The expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate, an...

But just in proportion as this process of extermination has acted on an enormous scale, so must the ...

When we no longer look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship, as at something wholly beyon...

As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, t...

When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings wh...

As natural selection acts by competition, it adapts the inhabitants of each country only in relation...

If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been forme...

One hand has surely worked throughout the universe.

Each species may have had its origin in a single pair, or individual, where an individual was suffic...

Humans are just barely intelligent tool users; Darwinian evolutionary selection stopped when languag...

Some people will bring up evolutionary biology and apes, how female apes bow to male apes - that sor...

The sad thing is that so many people, in the belief that the universe is organized to suit and influ...

At least two important conservative thinkers, Ayn Rand and Leo Strauss, were unbelievers or nonbelie...

Nothing proves evolution more than the survival of the religious belief. It shows we are still fearf...

At least two important conservative thinkers, Ayn Rand and Leo Strauss, were unbelievers or nonbelie...

Past and present religious atrocities have occured not because we are evil, but because it is a fact...

Everyone knows history is written by the winners, but that cliche misses a crucial detail: Over time...

Disaster is a natural part of my evolution toward tragedy and dissolution.

If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, t...

What I want is to live of that initial and primordial something that was what made some things reach...

It is failure that guides evolution; perfection provides no incentive for improvement, and nothing i...

Businesses are great structures for managing big projects. It’s like trying to develop the ability t...

If we don't embrace them, then we are as undeserving of life as the caveman who freezes to death bec...

If we were truly created by God, then why do we still occasionally bite the insides of our own mouth...

I find it far more awesome, wonderful, that creation; our appearance in the world; should be the cul...

If it has been revealed to man that the Almighty made him out of the dust of the earth, and breathed...

It is a more rational belief that man may become a brute than that a brute may become a man; and it ...

Indeed, the maligned American pastime of baseball may be by-far the greatest and best sport by one c...

It is a total mystery how we evolved minds capable of piloting cars through wild maneuvers using a w...

Evolve solutions; when you find a good one, don't stop.

Tis from the resemblance of the external actions of animals to those we ourselves perform, that we j...

Alternatively, anyone who favors Intelligent Design in lieu of evolution might pause to wonder why G...

To only responsible choice I can make is to be love and happiness." Vincellent"Love the world as you...

We live in the Age of the Higher Brain, the cerebral cortex that has grown enormously over the last ...

Two chemicals called actin and myosin evolved eons ago to allow the muscles in insect wings to contr...

An island, on the other hand, is small. There are fewer species, and the competition for survival ha...

When faced with a radical crisis, when the old way of being in the world, of interacting with each o...

Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution? I suspect that it does; I suspect that th...

Two forces pervade human life, the Gita says: the upward thrust of evolution and the downward pull o...

Ending up with that gigantic outsized brain must have taken some sort of runaway evolutionary proces...