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Evolution Quotes

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Evolution Quotes

“Evolution is a theory in a special philosophical sense of science, but in terms of ordinary laymen's use of language, it's a fact, .. Evolution is a fact in the same sense that it's a fact that the Earth is round and not flat, [that] the Earth goes round the Sun. Both those are also theories, but they're theories that have never been disproved and never will be disproved.”

“Science was tearing through the 'fine-spun ecclesiastical cobwebs' to behold a new cosmos, in which our Earth is merely an 'eccentric speck' - a world of evolution 'and unchanging causation'. It invited new ways of thinking. It demanded a new rationale for belief. With science's truths the only accessible ones, 'blind faith' was no longer admirable but 'the one unpardonable sin'.”

“The existing and long-standing use of the word 'evolution' in our state's textbooks has not adversely affected Georgians' belief in the omnipotence of God as creator of the universe, There can be no incompatibility between Christian faith and proven facts concerning geology, biology, and astronomy. There is no need to teach that stars can fall out of the sky and land on a flat Earth in order to defend our religious faith.”

“After ages during which the earth produced harmless trilobites and butterflies, evolution progressed to the point at which it generated Neros, Genghis Khans, and Hitlers. This, however, is a passing nightmare; in time the earth will become again incapable of supporting life, and peace will return.”

“If the positive innovations connect exponentially before the massive breakdowns reinforce one another, the system can re-pattern itself to a higher order of consciousness and freedom without the predicted economic, environmental, and social collapse...If the system could go either way, a slight intervention to assist the convergence of the positive can tip the scales of evolution in favor of the enhancement of life on Earth.”

“The issue, as correctly emphasized by Carl Sagan, is the probability of the evolution of high intelligence and an electronic civilization on an inhabited world. Once we have life (and almost surely it will be very different from life on Earth), what is the probability of its developing a lineage with high intelligence? On Earth, among millions of lineages of organisms and perhaps 50 billion speciation events, only one led to high intelligence; this makes me believe in its utter improbability.”

“It is naïve to suppose that the acceptance of evolution theory depends upon the evidence of a number of so-called "proofs"; it depends rather upon the fact that the evolutionary theory permeates and supports every branch of biological science, much as the notion of the roundness of the earth underlies all geodesy and all cosmological theories on which the shape of the earth has a bearing. Thus antievolutionism is of the same stature as flat-earthism.”

“I think evolution should be taught as an accepted principle. I say that also as the daughter of a school teacher, a science teacher, who has instilled in me a respect for science. I think it should be taught in our schools. I won't ever deny that I see the hand of God in this beautiful creation that is earth. But - that is not a part of state policy or a local curriculum in a school district. Science should be taught in science class.”

“As Stephen Jay Gould pointed out in Time, in no other Western country is the teaching of Evolution regarded as controversial. Throughout the world, one way or another, most Christian denominations have managed to reconcile belief in God with belief in the mechanisms of natural selection. A French or German or Scandinavian politician who called for students to entertain as a reasonable deduction from existing evidence the proposition that Earth is at most 10,000 years old would be bundled off to a mental hospital.”

“was revolution much more than one fast kick forward in the long process called evolution? We condemened the 'cost' of revolution; but was it higher than the cost over centuries in backward, underdeveloped communities, which still covered two-thirds of the earth and which still could not guarantee their populations daily bread?”

“It's just as hard for man to break the habit of thinking of himself as central to the species as it was to break the habit of thinking of himself as central to the universe. He sees himself quite unconsciously as the main line of evolution, with a female satellite revolving around him as the moon revolves around the earth. This not only causes him to overlook valuable clues to our ancestry, but sometimes leads him into making statements that are arrant and demonstrable nonsense.”

“Evolution is the fundamental idea in all of life science, in all of biology. The key to our being here now is time, 4.54 billion (Earth) years of time. Nuclear fission wasn't discovered until long after Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace published their original books and papers, for example. Our ability to measure atomic masses wasn't developed until long after their deaths. These features of nature enabled us to reckon the age of the Earth and compare it with speciation rates here.”

“We've begun at last to wonder about our origins, star stuff contemplating the stars, organized collections of ten billion billion billion atoms contemplating the evolution of matter, tracing that long path by which it arrived at consciousness here on the planet Earth and perhaps throughout the cosmos. Our obligation to survive and flourish is owed not just to ourselves but also to that cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.”

“The Visitors reported by contactees, abductees, and other witnesses may, in fact, be a highly advanced amphibian or reptilian culture from an extraterrestrial world, who evolved into the dominant species on their planet millions of years ago and who have interacted in Earth's evolution as explorers, observers, caretakers, and genetic engineers.”

“...Which brings me to the Hubble Space Telescope's newest images. If it's wonder that you're looking for, and mystery, don't just scan the photographs. Stop and think about them. Try to imagine the scale. The Earth is just a speck of dust on one distant whirling tentacle of the Milky Way galaxy, which contains billions of stars. A 'collision' of galaxies seems unimaginably large - and yet it is something scientists long ago imagined... The imaginings of pseudoscience are feeble by comparison.”

“This earth is one of the rare spots in the cosmos where mind has flowered. Man is a product of nearly three billion years of evolution, in whose person the evolutionary process has at last become conscious of itself and its possibilities. Whether he likes it or not, he is responsible for the whole further evolution of our planet.”

“It is essential for evolution to become the central core of any educational system, because it is evolution, in the broad sense, that links inorganic nature with life, and the stars with the earth, and matter with mind, and animals with man. Human history is a continuation of biological evolution in a different form.”

“Each of us is the next step in evolution along the lineage created by our two parents. Our higher purpose on earth can be found by recognizing what our parents accomplished and where they left off. By reconciling what they gave us with what they left us to resolve, we can get a clear picture of who we are and what we are meant to do.”

“Evolution as described by Charles Darwin is an scientific theory, abundantly reconfirmed, explaining physical phenomena by physical causes. Intelligent Design is a faith-based initiative in rhetorical argument. Should we teach I.D. in America's public schools? Yes, let's do - not as science, but alongside other spiritual beliefs, such as Islam, Zoroastrianism and the Hindu Idea that Earth rests on Chukwa, the giant turtle.”

“It is an odd fact of evolution that we are the only species on Earth capable of creating science and philosophy. There easily could have been another species with some scientific talent, say that of the average human ten-year-old, but not as much as adult humans have; or one that is better than us at physics but worse at biology; or one that is better than us at everything. If there were such creatures all around us, I think we would be more willing to concede that human scientific intelligence might be limited in certain respects.”

“Natural history is not taught in seminary. This is curious, as most people in pastoral ministry are about 567 times more likely to be asked about cosmology or sub-nuclear physics or human biology or evolution than they are to be asked about irregular Greek verbs or the danger of the patripassionist heresy. If we monotheists are going to go around claiming that our "God made the heaven and the earth," it is not unreasonable to expect us to know something about what that heaven and earth actually are.”

“Things do look pretty grim, but I think there are more laughs in Hellboy in Hell than there are in B.P.R.D.: Hell on Earth. I think Hell is getting nicer and Earth is getting worse. Once we figured out what we were doing, the whole point of the Hellboy/B.P.R.D. stuff has always been evolution. The kind of evolution we're seeing on Earth is nasty evolution - part of this kind of evolution is that you have to wipe out what was there before you can replace it.”

“The earth has continued to change, from rapid climatic changes that have caused the glaciers and the ice sheets to basically bulldoze the landscape and cause species compression in the tropics and cause mass species extinction - you know, all these huge changes. In terms of evolution, every species is doomed to eventual extinction. The natural world is constantly changing. So, to deal with "environmental problems," in quotes, totally misses the issue. That is not the way we want to define our problem if we're going to find our solution.”

“As a species, taking all in all, we are still too young, too juvenile, to be trusted. We have spread across the face of the earth in just a few thousand years, no time at all as evolution clocks time, covering all livable parts of the planet, endangering other forms of life, and now threatening ourselves.”

“Darwin's theory of evolution is a framework by which we understand the diversity of life on Earth. But there is no equation sitting there in Darwin's 'Origin of Species' that you apply and say, 'What is this species going to look like in 100 years or 1,000 years?' Biology isn't there yet with that kind of predictive precision.”

“A sense of being part of the great all-inclusive life prompts us to reflect on our own place and on how we ought to live. Guarding others' lives, the ecology and the earth is the same as protecting one's own life. By like token, wounding them is the same thing as wounding oneself. Consequently, it is the duty of each of us to participate as members of the life community in the evolution of the universe. We can do this by guarding earth's ecological system.”

“Human beings are so destructive. I sometimes think we're a kind of plague, that will scrub the earth clean. We destroy things so well that I sometimes think, maybe that's our function. Maybe every few eons, some animal comes along that kills off the rest of the world, clears the decks, and lets evolution proceed to its next phase.”

“Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.”