Quotes About Darwin

According to Teleology, each organism is like a rifle bullet fired straight at a mark; according to Darwin, organisms are like grapeshot of which one hits something and the rest fall wide.

Darwin's own evidence was confined to variations WITHIN the KIND (Genesis 1:25), i.e. beak variations within Galapagos finches.

This strategy suggests the following: To make the most out of your deep work sessions, build rituals of the same level of strictness and idiosyncrasy as the important thinkers mentioned previously. There's a good reason for this mimicry. Great minds like Caro and Darwin didn't deploy rituals to be weird; they did so because success in their work depended on their ability to go deep, again and again

Darwin and Karl Marx didn't reveal the secret of the world. Of all the theories about creation, the one expounded in Genesis is the most intelligent. All this talk about primordial mists or the Big Bang is a wild absurdity. If someone found a watch on an island and said it had been made by itself or that it developed through evolution, he would be considered a lunatic. But according to modern science, the universe evolved all on its own. Is the universe less complicated than a watch?

(Conviction) is possible only in a world more primitive than ours can be perceived to be. A man can achieve a simply gnomic conviction only by ignoring the radical describers of his environment, or by hating them, as convinced men have hated, say, Darwin and Freud, as agents of some devil.

The four most influential moderns: Darwin, Marx, Freud, and (the productive) Einstein were scholars but not academics. It has always been hard to do genuine - and no perishable - work within institutions

Margulis said, because rival organisms and lack of resources prevent the vast majority of P. vulgaris from reproducing. This is natural selection, Darwin's great insight. All living creatures have the same purpose: to make more of themselves, ensuring their biological future by the only means available. And all living creatures have a maximum reproductive rate: the greatest number of offspring they can generate in a lifetime.

But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind? [To William Graham 3 July 1881]

But Natural Selection, as we shall hereafter see, is a power incessantly ready for action, and is immeasurably superior to man's feeble efforts, as the works of Nature are to those of Art.

Our descent, then, is the origin of our evil passions!! The devil under form of Baboon is our grandfather.

Man could no longer be regarded as the Lord of Creation, a being apart from the rest of nature. He was merely the representative of one among many Families of the order Primates in the class Mammalia.

É muito fácil esconder nossa ignorância debaixo de expressões como plano de criação, unidade de padrão, etc., e pensar que explicamos um fato apenas por reafirmá-lo.

I hope that I may be excused for entering on these personal details, as I give them to show that I have not been hasty in coming to a decision.

What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel work of nature!

Through his powers of intellect, articulate language has been evolved; and on this his wonderful advancement has mainly depended.

Natural selection rendered evolution scientifically intelligible: it was this more than anything else which convinced professional biologists like Sir Joseph Hooker, T. H. Huxley and Ernst Haeckel.

What an extraordinary thing it is, Mr. Darwin seems to spend hours in cracking a horse-whip in his room, for I often hear the crack when I pass under his windows.

Why is The Origin of Species such a great book? First of all, because it convincingly demonstrates the fact of evolution: it provides a vast and well-chosen body of evidence showing that existing animals and plants cannot have been separately created in their present forms, but must have evolved from earlier forms by slow transformation.

The differences of Mr. [Patrick] Matthew's views from mine are not of much importance: he seems to consider that the world was nearly depopulated at successive periods, and then re-stocked;

Sympathy beyond the confines of man, that is, humanity to lower animals, seems to be one of the latest moral acquisitions. This virtue, one of the noblest with which man is endowed, seems to arise incidentally from our sympathies becoming more tender and more widely diffused, until they are extended to all sentient beings.

The Grecian poet, Theognis ... saw how important selection, if carefully applied, would be for the improvement of mankind. He saw likewise that wealth often checks the proper action of sexual selection.

How have all those exquisite adaptations of one part of the organisation to another part, and to the conditions of life, and of one organic being to another being, been perfected?

Esto demuestra lo necesario que es el que todo nuevo punto de vista se explique con una extensión considerable, con el fin de despertar la atención del público.

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know littler, and not those who know much, who so positively assertive that this or that problem will never be solved by science.