Quotes About Darwin

What surprises me most when surveying the great destinies of man is always seeing before me the opposite of what Darwin and his school see or want to see today: selection in favor of the stronger, in favor of those who have come off better, the progress of the species. The very opposite is quite palpably the case: the elimination of the strokes of luck, the uselessness of the better-constituted types, the inevitable domination achieved by the average, even below-average types.

Mendel's last forays into botany included the satisfying demonstration that even the greatest living scientists could be wrong. Armed with a fine paintbrush and a microscope, the poor-sighted abbot proved that a single grain of pollen was enough to fertilise an ovum – something that Charles Darwin had insisted was impossible.

As Darwin himself was at pains to point out, natural selection is all about differential survival within species, not between them.

I was brought up to understand Darwin's theory of evolution. I spent hours and hours in the Natural History Museum in London looking at the descriptions of how different kinds of animals had evolved, looking at the sequence of fossil bones looking gradually more and more and more and more like the modern fossil.

Charles Darwin got his theory, his notion of natural selection, evolution, and so did its independent discoverer, Alfred Wallace, from reading Malthus.

Agricultural practice served Darwin as the material basis for the elaboration of his theory of Evolution, which explained the natural causation of the adaptation we see in the structure of the organic world. That was a great advance in the knowledge of living nature.

A major fault, for example, is the fact that, along with the materialist principle, Darwin introduced into his theory of evolution reactionary Malthusian ideas.

I hope I may have succeeded in presenting to you, however imperfectly, the currents of thought due to the work of the immortal Darwin which have helped to make anthropology what it is at the present time.

We're presently in the midst of a third intellectual revolution. The first came with Newton: the planets obey physical laws. The second came with Darwin: biology obeys genetic laws. In today's third revolution, were coming to realize that even minds and societies emerge from interacting laws that can be regarded as computations. Everything is a computation .

At no time am I a quick thinker or writer: whatever I have done in science has solely been by long pondering, patience and industry.

Darwin's familiarity with human-caused extinction is also clear from On the Origin of Species. In one of the many passages in which he heaps scorn on the catastrophists, he observes that animals inevitably become rare before they become extinct: "we know this has been the progress of events with those animals which have been exterminated, either locally or wholly, through man's agency.

Darwin's theory about how species originated doubled as a theory of how they vanished. Extinction and evolution were to each other the warp and weft of life's fabric, or, if you prefer, two sides of the same coin. "The appearance of new forms and the disappearance of old forms" were, Darwin wrote, "bound together." Driving both was the "struggle for existence," which rewarded the fit and eliminated the less so.

What Darwin did to nature, Sigmund Freud did to the self.

The Galapagos Islands are probably the most famous wildlife-watching destination in the world. And no wonder - it's almost impossible to exaggerate the sheer spectacle of the place that provided inspiration for Charles Darwin's ground-breaking theory of natural selection.

We now have a quarter of a million fossil species, but the situation hasn't changed much... We have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin's time.

Thomson's views on the recent age of the world have been for some time one of my sorest troubles.

Ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transitions than we had in Darwin's time.

Do you remember what Darwin says about music? He claims that the power of producing and appreciating it existed among the human race long before the power of speech was arrived at. Perhaps that is why we are so subtly influenced by it. There are vague memories in our souls of those misty centuries when the world was in its childhood.

you remember what Darwin says about music? He claims that the power of producing and appreciating it existed among the human race long before the power of speech was arrived at. Perhaps that is why we are so subtly influenced by it. There are vague memories in our souls of those misty centuries when the world was in its childhood.

Do you remember what Darwin says about music? He claims that the power of producing and appreciating it existed among the human race long before the power of speech was arrived at. Perhaps

I remember driving back from Portsmouth so tired that a voice in my head said I'll just close my eyes until I get to the bridge ahead. The next thing I knew was the wheels rumbling over the cat's eyes. I had tried to take a nap while driving. I'm not sure what Darwin would make of that.

Darwin recognized the fact that paleontology then seemed to provide evidence against rather for evolution in general or the gradual origin of taxonomic categories in particular.

Darwin himself recorded the fact that he accepted the Malthusian idea.

Popular science can say some pretty wild things these days, but the supernatural is still out, as is Lamarck. You can have as many dimensions as you want, as long as none of them contains ghosts, telepathy, anything that fucks with Charles Darwin, or anything that Hitler liked (apart from Charles Darwin).