Quotes About Darwin

In today's pick-and-mix culture, evolutionary psychology proposes itself as yet another possible opiate for the people. Freud and Marx are dead – so long live Darwin.

Emulating the persistence and care of Darwin, we must collect facts with open-minded watchulness, unbiased by crotchets or notions; fact on fact, instance on instance, experiment upon experiment; facts which neatly fit the idea of their relationship, may establish a general principle." Sir William Osler, Counsels and Ideals

What's the point of anyone's search for answers? The truth you find will always be replaced by someone else's. Someday even Darwin will look like a quaint Ptolemy who saw what he could see but no more.

Evolution thus is merely contingent on certain processes articulated by Darwin: variation and selection.

Darwin based his theory on generalizations that were strictly empirical. You can go out and see that organisms do vary, that variations are inherited, and that every organism is capable of increasing its numbers in sufficiently favorable circumstances.

The Influence of Evolution The many factors motivating Verner to bring Ota to the United States were complex, but he evidently was "much influenced by the theories of Charles Darwin" a theory of evolution which, as it developed historically, increasingly divided humankind into arbitrarily contrived races (Rymer 1992, 3). Verner also believed that the Africans were an "inferior race" (Verner 1908a; 10, 717). Hallet shows that Darwin also felt Pygmies were inferior humans:

Darwin got it all wrong, you see. Fitness has nothing to do with it. It's survival of the sickest. That's all.

Those of us who pursue science studies are the Darwins of science, showing how the exquisite beauty of facts, theories, instruments and machines can be accounted for without ever resorting to teleological principles or arguments by design

Charles Darwin's early academic record was so poor that his father predicted he would be a disgrace to his family.

It seems to me that for Darwin the pulsing of evolutionary rates was a strictly vertical phenomenon.

The freaking Leanansidhe, deputy of Her Wickedness, with her Nietzsche and Darwin Were Sentimental Pansies outlook on life

Although Darwin did not have genetics at hand to prove his case, we now know that humans and chimpanzees share 98 percent of their genes; humans and fruit flies share 44 percent of their genes.)

The destruction of our technological society in a fit of nuclear peevishness would become disastrous even if there were many millions of immediate survivors. The environment toward which they were fitted would be gone, and Darwin's demon would wipe them out remorselessly and without a backward glance.

But sequence comparisons simply can't account for the development of complex biochemical systems any more than Darwin's comparison of simple and complex eyes told him how vision worked.

Darwin's ideas are devices for generating data. Darwin's theory opens possibilities for inquiry; Agassiz's closes them.

Darwin knew that the mother of the blush was shame. For Darwin, shame defines our essential humanity. Silvan Tomkins views shame as an innate feeling that limits our experience of interest, curiosity and pleasure.

Pocaterra looked at blushing as the external sign of shame and believed that blushing was both the recognition of having made a mistake as well as the desire to make amends. Three hundred years later Darwin would posit blushing as that which distinguishes us from all other animals. Darwin knew that the mother of the blush was shame. For Darwin, shame defines our essential humanity.

Charles called himself a Darwinist, and yet he had not really understood Darwin. But then, nor had Darwin himself.

As the number of unexplained, irreducibly complex biological systems increases, our confidence that Darwin's criterion of failure has been met skyrockets toward the maximum that science allows.

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

Charles Darwin himself recognized this problem and feared it when he wrote hauntingly: "Within me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of a man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy."40 The problem being, of course, that Darwin's theory itself was the conviction of man's mind, and thus by his own logic, he couldn't trust it.

The theory of evolution is outstandingly the most important theory in biology.

Charles Darwin wrote a famous book in 18 [gibberish]. And that book was an interesting book, cuz it was called "Monkey-Monkey-Monkey-Monkey-Monkey-Monkey-You".

Bueno, la teoría de Darwin no deja de ser sólo una teoría —comenté—. Si, a estas alturas, hubieran podido demostrarla, sería la ley de Darwin.