August Weismann Quotes
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The world has been evolved, not created: it has arisen little by little from a small beginning, and has increased through the activity of the elemental forces embodied in itself, and so has rather grown than come into being at an almighty word.
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Every individual alive today, even the very highest, is to be derived in an unbroken line from the first and lowest forms.
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What a sublime idea of the infinite might of the great Architect, the Cause of all causes, the Father of all fathers, the Ens Entium! For if we would compare the Infinite, it would surely require a greater Infinite to cause the causes of effects than to produce the effects themselves.
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The nature of heredity is based upon the transmission of nuclear substance with a specific molecular constitution. This substance is the specific nucleoplasm of the germ-cell, to which I have given the name of germ-plasm.
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We do not draw conclusions with our eyes, but with our reasoning powers, and if the whole of the rest of living nature proclaims with one accord from all sides the evolution of the world of organisms, we cannot assume that the process stopped short of Man. But it follows also that the factors which brought about the development of Man from his Simian ancestry must be the same as those which have brought about the whole of evolution.
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The theory of evolution has often been perverted so as to indicate that what is merely animal and brutal must gain the ascendancy. The contrary seems to me to be the case, for in man it is the spirit, and not the body, which is the deciding factor.