Darwin Quotes

• At the heart of Darwin’s theory, as one of his biographers has put it, is “the denial of humanity’s special status.”

  

  Elizabeth Kolbert
  • Heart
  • Biographers
  • Humanity's

• In one of my latest conversations with Darwin he expressed himself very gloomily on the future of humanity, on the ground that in our modern civilization natural selection had no play, and the fittest did not survive. Those who succeed in the race for wealth are by no means the best or the most intelligent, and it is notorious that our population is more largely renewed in each generation from the lower than from the middle and upper classes.

  

  Alfred Russel Wallace
  • Future
  • Humanity
  • Intelligent

• The big picture, I think, is that common ancestry is evidentially prior to natural selection in Darwin's theory and in contemporary evolutionary biology as well.

  

  Elliott Sober
  • Picture
  • Theory
  • Selection

• It seems to me that for Darwin the pulsing of evolutionary rates was a strictly vertical phenomenon.

  

  Ernst Mayr
  • Phenomenon
  • Evolutionary
  • Rates

• Beyond the Einsteins and Darwins, most scientists don't have chroniclers. Einstein and Darwin were geniuses - that helps. Many scientists do amazing stuff, but it just disappears into footnotes and dusty medical journals. If I were masochistic enough, I could spend the rest of my life rescuing scientists. Most of them aren't natural self-promoters.

  

  Deborah Blum
  • Natural
  • Scientists
  • Promoters

• I couldn't imagine Darwin hoping for a stronger confirmation of his ideas than what we see when we compare the human and chimp genomes.

  

  Bob Waterston
  • Ideas
  • Imagine
  • Confirmation

• Evolution thus is merely contingent on certain processes articulated by Darwin: variation and selection.

  

  Ernst Mayr
  • Evolution
  • Selection
  • Articulated

• Darwin repeatedly used the hypothesis of common ancestry as a platform on which to build his various ideas about testing hypotheses concerning natural selection. He also argued that adaptive similarities provide little or no evidence for common ancestry. Although this second claim needs to be fine-tuned, Darwin was right that ample evidence for common ancestry can exist even if none of the characteristics we observe were caused to evolve by natural selection.

  

  Elliott Sober
  • Evidence
  • Build
  • Characteristics

• Darwin and his descendants couldn't have asked for a better example of how you make scientific predictions and how you verify them in a very rigorous way.

  

  Eric Lander
  • Predictions
  • Darwin
  • Verify

• Much of the geographical work of the past hundred years... has either explicitly or implicitly taken its inspiration from biology, and in particular Darwin. Many of the original Darwinians, such as Hooker, Wallace, Huxley, Bates, and Darwin himself, were actively concerned with geographical exploration, and it was largely facts of geographical distribution in a spatial setting which provided Darwin with the germ of his theory.

  

  David Stoddart
  • Science
  • Inspiration
  • Hundred

• Asked to make a list of the men who have most dominated the thinking of the modern world, many educated people would name Freud, Einstein, Marx and Darwin. Of these four, only Darwin was not Jewish. In a world where Jews are only a tiny percentage of the population, what is the secret of the disproportionate importance the Jews have had in the history of Western culture?

  

  Ernest Van den Haag
  • History
  • Population
  • Educated

• Anyone who writes about "Darwin's theory of evolutionin the singular, without segregating the theories of gradual evolution, common descent, speciation, and the mechanism of natural selection, will be quite unable to discuss the subject competently.

  

  Ernst Mayr
  • Evolution
  • Discuss
  • Mechanism

• We still do not know the mechanics of evolution in spite of the over-confident claims in some quarters, nor are we likely to make further progress in this by the classical methods of paleontology or biology; and we shall certainly not advance matters by jumping up and down shrilling, `Darwin is god and I, So-and-so, am his prophet'

  

  Errol White
  • Progress
  • Evolution
  • Biology

• We shall certainly not advance matters by jumping up and down shrilling, 'Darwin is god and I, so-and-so, am his prophet.

  

  Errol White
  • Advance
  • Jumping
  • Darwin

• Darwin and his successors have railed against the fallacy of confusing the current utility of a trait with the reason the trait evolved. For example, Darwin argued that skull sutures in mammals did not evolve because they facilitate live birth; the sutures were in place well before live birth evolved. Checking the chronological order in which different traits evolved in a lineage is one way to test an adaptive hypothesis; the fact of common ancestry is what makes that checking possible.

  

  Elliott Sober
  • Birth
  • Confusing
  • Hypothesis

• 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.

  

  Ernst Mayr
  • Generation
  • Evolution
  • Selection

• I think that I could see Darwin having a relationship with Asia.

  

  Susan Oliver
  • Relationship
  • Asia
  • Darwin

• Darwin's prediction of rampant, albeit gradual, change affecting all lineages through time is refuted. The record is there, and the record speaks for tremendous anatomical conservatism. Change in the manner Darwin expected is just not found in the fossil record.

  

  Niles Eldredge
  • Expected
  • Prediction
  • Darwin