Quotes About Darwin

If Mr. Darwin were to be believed, then it was from the timeless dapple of the forest's canopy that men had first descended, and it was the forest's roots that drank men's bodies when they died, returned their vital salts back to the prehistoric treetops in gold elevator cages made of sap.

The only way in which Darwin's data made sense was to suppose that species battled for survival, and that evolution came when one slight adaptation of a species proved more successful than another in the battle: a process which he named 'natural selection'. There was nothing benevolent about the providence which watched over the process. Reason was served her notice as the handmaid of Christian revelation.

Darwin theorized that there was something left over after sexual attractiveness had served its purpose and compelled us to mate. This he called 'beauty' and thought it might be what drives the human animal to make art.

In Machiavelli, as in Darwin, nature is set against nature. Fortuna, impersonal blind chance, the agency of floods, havoc-wreaking storms and plagues, confronts virtù, the power of mind to outwit the entropic, leveling tendencies of physical forces. The essence of virtù is to be clever and strong, and it is ethically neutral.

Darwin caused controversy, not merely because his ideas contradicted Genesis, but because they fell foul of the way in which Genesis had been read by those influenced by the Enlightenment, for it was the Enlightenment that conceived of the human as almost exclusively rational and intellectual, and set the human at a distance from the animal.

I am also fascinated by how Darwin's theory of evolution applies to zombies.

Evolution as such is no longer a theory for a modern author. It is as much a fact as that the earth revolves around the sun.

Now, evolution is the substance of fossils hoped for, the evidence of links not seen.

Darwin paid particular attention to disconfirming evidence. Objectivity maintenance routines are totally required in life if you're going to be a great thinker.

Not to take this web of dualities as a sign we are on the right track would be a bit like believing that God put fossils into the rocks in order to mislead Darwin about the evolution of life.

The lives of those such as Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein are plainly of interest in their own right, as well as for the light they shed on the way these great scientists worked. But are 'routine' scientists as fascinating as their science? Here I have my doubts.

Just as we might take Darwin as an example of the normal extraverted thinking type, the normal introverted thinking type could be represented by Kant. The one speaks with facts, the other relies on the subjective factor. Darwin ranges over the wide field of objective reality, Kant restricts himself to a critique of knowledge.

Darwin, on grounds such as this, believed that the human species is a moral one—that, in fact, we are the only moral animal. "A moral being is one who is capable of comparing his past and future actions or motives, and of approving or disapproving of them," he wrote. "We have no reason to suppose that any of the lower animals have this capacity.

The truth depends on what we say the truth is. If men are told that the impulse to philander is deeply "natural," essentially irrepressible, then the impulse—for those men, at least— may indeed be so. In Darwin's day, though, men were told something else: that animal impulses are formidable foes but can, with constant and arduous effort, be defeated. This then became, for many men, the truth. Free will was, in an important sense, created by their belief in it.

It's true that Darwin didn't live the optimally utilitarian life. No one ever has. Still, as he prepared to die, he could rightly have reflected on a life decently and compassionately lived, a string of duties faithfully discharged, a painful, if only partial, struggle against the currents of selfishness whose source he was the first man to see. It wasn't a perfect life; but human beings are capable of worse.

If you look at a platypus, you think that God might get stoned, "OK, let's take a beaver and put on a duck's bill. It's a mammal, but it lays eggs. Hey Darwin, kiss my ass!"

In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment.

Darwin begins by assuming life upon the earth; the Bible reveals the source of life and chronicles its creation.

Don't you miss the world?" He is quiet; so is she. Both ride spirals of memory. "I have the whole world right here," he says, and taps the cover of Darwin. "And in my radios. Right at my fingertips.

I have always thought that Darwin was wrong: his theory doesn't account for all this variety of species. It hasn't the necessary multiplicity. Nowadays some people are fond of saying that at last evolution has produced a species that is able to understand the whole process which gave it birth. Now that you can't say. [Drury, Conversation with Wittgenstein, p174]

be expectant, do not be dull, but bring the lost fullness of your intelligence to this endeavor as you come quietly into the presence of wild things. -- Haupt quoting Darwin

Sympathy for the lowest animals is one of the noblest virtues with which man is endowed.

Even Charles Darwin, that human decoder ring of bizarre behavior, found the idea of saving a stranger's life to be a total head-scratcher.

Charles Darwin sailed around the world for two years on the 'Beagle,' and he had quite a bit of interest in things like the iguanas of the Galapagos, even though they were primitive compared to your average Englishman.