Quotes About Darwin

Kant had disproved the ontological argument. Hume had shown that for any supposed miracle, the evidence that it had not happened was always greater than the evidence that it had. Darwin had shown the error in the 'argument from design'.

Yet Darwin knew that altruism was admired in every human society of which he was aware. Even animals take risks for the sake of the group. The one that emits a cry to warn of the presence of a predator helps the group escape while making its own detection more likely. In the language of today: how could selfish genes come together and produce selfless people?

Hitler claimed ideological forebears in Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche;1 Stalin took his cues from Marx; the eugenicists took their ideas from Darwin and Comte.

thought. Successionism means that one faith can replace a previous one that has ceased to function. In religious terms, it is comparable to what Darwin would later postulate in the theory of evolution: the dinosaurs were replaced by the Neanderthals who were in turn replaced by fully developed Homo sapiens.

The Church had, after all, survived Galileo, Luther, and Darwin. Even Dan Brown.

Well, biology today as I see it has an amiable look - quite different from the 19th-century view that the whole arrangement of nature is hostile, 'red in tooth and claw.' That came about because people misread Darwin's 'survival of the fittest.'

Mr. Darwin contributes some striking and ingenious instances of the way in which the principle partially affects the chain, or rather network of life, even to the total obliteration of certain meshes.

As Darwin pointed out in The Origin of Species (opening pages of chapter three), the 'struggle for existence' can often be described just as well as a mutual dependence. And harmless coexistence as parts of the same eco-sphere is also a very common relation. . . . Among social creatures, positive gregariousness, a liking for each other's company, is the steady, unnoticed background for the conflicts.

The obsession with which those on the right resist Charles Darwin's insight – that the complexity of nature does not imply a designer – matches the obsession with which those on the left resist Adam Smith's insight – that the complexity of society does not imply a planner.

Henry's novel The Portrait of a Lady was written in thrall to Darwin's idea of female choice as a force in evolution.

It is when we go beyond instinct that we seem most idiosyncratically human. Perhaps, as Darwin suggested, the difference is one of degree rather than kind; it is quantitative, not qualitative.

the dread of Darwin is rising to hysteria, even among his learned colleagues. It was not long ago people blamed Darwin's Origin for encouraging the abolitionists and the war. But now even abolitionists and transcendentalists have turned against him." "How are people so irrational?" he asked, but he knew. Even the abolitionists had no wish to be placed inside creation, subject to its laws. They wished to rule over it from the head of God's table.

Presumptions of a lifetime are perilous things to overturn. Presumptions of many lifetimes, in this case." Of all lifetimes ever lived, in this case. Every person in history must have placed himself at the head of a Creator's table. To see that table overturned, cutlery and china dashed to the floor, one's very place lost, was to witness the sky falling. Thatcher hadn't fully considered Darwin in such threatening light.

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.

As he reads through his observations, a new thought begins to take shape in his mind, which provokes a whole new set of notes that will only make complete sense to Darwin two years later, after the Malthus episode.

Darwin's mind had been profoundly shaped by Lyell's understanding of the deep time of geological transformation, but standing on the beach, watching the breakers crash against the coral, he knows that his mentor is wrong about the origin of the atolls. It is not a story of simple geology, he realizes. It is a story about the innovative persistence of life.

Los innovadores legendarios, como Franklin, Snow y Darwin, poseen unas cualidades intelectuales comunes –cierta rapidez mental y una curiosidad sin límites–, pero también comparten otra característica: tienen un montón de aficiones.

Even the humblest mammal's strong sexual, parental, and social instincts give rise to 'do unto others as yourself' and 'love thy neighbor as thyself'.

Evolution, thus, is merely contingent on certain processes articulated by Darwin : variation and selection. No longer is a fixed object transformed, as in transformational evolution, but an entirely new start is, so to speak, made in every generation.

Therefore, it came as a terrible shock to the Victorian age when Darwin, following his theory of common descent, incorporated the human species into the animal kingdom as a descendant of primate ancestors.

Darwin completely rejected typological thinking and introduced instead the entirely different concept now called population thinking. All groupings of living organisms, including humanity, are populations that consist of uniquely different individuals. By rejecting the constancy of populations, Darwin helped to introduce history into scientific thinking and to promote a distinctly new approach to explanatory interpretation in science.

Before Darwin, our world was very religious. People saw altruism as something given by God for us to be good so that we could go to Paradise.

The people who had the most impact on me when I was young were Freud and Darwin, but growing up I also had my film idols.

In his writings, Darwin makes it clear that he cannot state whether or not there is a creator in charge. The idea was impossible to prove or disprove then, and it still is today.