Quotes About Natural

Finally, a principal reason for the lack of attention to "unclean spirits" and Jesus' "acts of power" in the Gospel stories is surely the modern "scientific" frame of mind that developed in the wake of the Enlightenment reduction of reality to what was natural and comprehensible by reason.

In the great burrow, however, things happened differently. The rabbits mingled naturally. They did not talk for talking's sake, in the artificial manner that human beings—and sometimes even their dogs and cats—do. But this did not mean that they were not communicating; merely that they were not communicating by talking.

Certainly nothing is unnatural that is not physically impossible.

The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity.

Even if not a single fossil has ever been found, the evidence from surviving animals would still overwhelmingly force the conclusion that Darwin was right.

I am an enthusiastic Darwinian, but I think Darwinism is too big a theory to be confined to the narrow context of the gene.

It is hard to believe that this simple truth is not understood by those leaders who forbid their followers to use effective contraceptive methods. They express a preference for 'natural' methods of population limitation, and a natural method is exactly what they are going to get. It is called starvation.

there are no natural borderlines in evolution. The illusion of a borderline is created by the fact that the evolutionary intermediates happen to be extinct.

A deep understanding of Darwinism teaches us to be wary of the easy assumption that design is the only alternative to chance

Watson retorted: 'Well I don't think we're for anything. We're just products of evolution. You can say, Gee, your life must be pretty bleak if you don't think there's a purpose. But I'm anticipating having a good lunch.' We did have a good lunch, too.

In the case of living machinery, the 'designer' is unconscious natural selection, the blind watchmaker.

There is absolutely no reason to believe that those things for which science does not yet have natural explanations will turn out to be of supernatural origin, any more than volcanoes or earthquakes or diseases turn out to be caused by angry deities, as people once believed they were. Of

Los genes operan de manera misteriosa.

Evolution is a trajectory through multidimensional space, in which every step of the way has to represent a body capable of surviving and reproducing about as well as the parental type reached by the preceding step of the trajectory.

The currency used in the casino of evolution is survival, strictly gene survival, but for many purposes individual survival is a reasonable approximation.

Darwinism is not a theory of random chance. It is a theory of random mutation plus non-random cumulative natural selection. Why, I wonder, is it so hard for even sophisticated scientists to grasp this simple point?

although evolution may seem, in some vague sense, a 'good thing', especially since we are the product of it, nothing actually 'wants' to evolve. Evolution

It is a strange fact, incidentally, that religious apologists love the anthropic principle. For some reason that makes no sense at all, they think it supports their case. Precisely the opposite is true. The anthropic principle, like natural selection, is an alternative to the design hypothesis. It provides a rational, design-free explanation for the fact that we find ourselves in a situation propitious to our existence.

anything that suggests that complicated life forms appeared suddenly, in one go (rather than evolving gradually step by step), is just a lazy story – no better than the fictional magic of a fairy godmother's wand. As

We are surrounded by endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful, and it is no accident, but the direct consequence of evolution by non-random natural selection – the only game in town, the greatest show on Earth.

Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact.

Natural selection is an improbability pump: a process that generates the statistically improbable. It systematically seizes the minority of random changes that have what it takes to survive, and accumulates them, step by tiny step over unimaginable timescales, until evolution eventually climbs mountains of improbability and diversity, peaks whose height and range seem to know no limit, the metaphorical mountain that I have called 'Mount Improbable'.

evolution is blind to the future

The earliest form of natural selection was simply a selection of stable forms and a rejection of unstable ones. There is no mystery about this. It had to happen by definition.