Quotes About Progress

Real life seeks the gentle slopes at the back of Mount Improbable, while creationists are blind to all but the daunting precipice at the front.

You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being ... Such is the privilege of living after Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Watson, Crick and their colleagues.

Evolution has no long-term goal. There is no long-distance target, no final perfection to serve as a criterion for selection, although human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution.

For more than three thousand million years, DNA has been the only replicator worth talking about in the world. But it does not necessarily hold these monopoly rights for all time. Whenever conditions arise in which a new kind of replicator can make copies of itself, the new replicators will tend to take over, and start a new kind of evolution of their own.

Darwinism is not a theory of random chance. It is a theory of random mutation plus non-random cumulative natural selection. . . . Natural selection . . . is a non-random force, pushing towards improvement. . . . Every generation has its Darwinian failures but every individual is descended only from previous generations' successful minorities. . . . [T]here can be no going downhill - species can't get worse as a prelude to getting better. . . . There may be more than one peak.

Given a hundred clones of Carl Sagan, we might have some hope for the next century.

My untidy habits drive me to follow the slash-and-burn (or Mad Hatter) principle. Work on a virgin table until the mess becomes unbearable, then move on to a clean table in a clean room — or, on a beautiful summer day like this, one of the five tables dotted around the garden. Trash that table and move on again.

As Arthur C. Clarke put it, in his Third Law: 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.' The miracles wrought by our technology would have seemed to the ancients no less remarkable than the tales of Moses parting the waters, or Jesus walking upon them.

That scientifically savvy philosopher Daniel Dennett pointed out that evolution counters one of the oldest ideas we have: 'the idea that it takes a big fancy smart thing to make a lesser thing. I call that the trickle-down theory of creation.

Why did it take so long for a Darwin to arrive on the scene? What delayed humanity's tumbling to that luminously simple idea which seems, on the face of it, so much easier to grasp than the mathematical ideas given us by Newton two centuries earlier - or, indeed, by Archimedes two millennia earlier?

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

Philosophy and the subjects known as 'humanities' are still taught almost as if Darwin had never lived.

natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being.

There is much that we are unsure about in science. Where science scores over alternative world views is that we know our uncertainty, we can often measure its magnitude, and we work optimistically to reduce it.

If something were to happen that went against our current understanding of reality, scientists would see that as a challenge to our present model, requiring us to abandon or at least change it. It is through such adjustments and subsequent testing that we approach closer and closer to what is true.

If there is something that appears to lie beyond the natural world as it is now imperfectly understood, we hope eventually to understand it and embrace it within the natural. As ever when we unweave a rainbow, it will not become less wonderful.

evolution is blind to the future

Dan Nilsson even remarks of compound eyes that 'It is only a small exaggeration to say that evolution seems to be fighting a desperate battle to improve a basically disastrous design.

The point about recurrent reproduction life cycles, and hence, by implication, the point about organisms, is that they allow repeated returns to the drawing board during evolutionary time.

the God of the Gaps' strategy condemned by the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Creationists eagerly seek a gap in present-day knowledge or understanding. If an apparent gap is found, it is assumed that God, by default, must fill it. What worries thoughtful theologians such as Bonhoeffer is that gaps shrink as science advances, and God is threatened with eventually having nothing to do and nowhere to hide. What worries scientists is something else.

My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years.' We clapped our hands red. No fundamentalist would ever say that. In practice, not all scientists would.

Something has shifted in the intervening decades. It has shifted in all of us, and the shift has no connection with religion. If anything, it happens in spite of religion, not because of it.

Darwin's 'survival of the fittest' is really a special case of a more general law of survival of the stable. The universe is populated by stable things. A stable thing is a collection of atoms that is permanent enough or common enough to deserve a name.

Half a wing could save your life by easing your fall from a tree of a certain height. And 51 per cent of a wing could save you if you fall from a slightly taller tree.