Evolution Quotes
-
When we speak of ordinary unqualified knowledge, my thought is that we are implicitly relativizing to the standards imposed by our evolution-derived humanity. These are standards that determine when we consider it appropriate to store beliefs just as a human being, rather than in one's capacity as an expert of one or another sort. Such stored beliefs are to be available for later use in one's own thought or in testimony to others.
-
You can't really be scientifically literate if you don't understand evolution. And you can't be an educated member of society if you don't understand science.
-
Women must become revolutionary. This cannot be evolution but revolution.
-
Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution, as not adequately supported by facts, seem quite to forget that their own theory it supported by no facts at all.
-
The theory of undirected evolution is already dead, but the work of science continues.
-
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.
-
Since Serengeti-scale savanna scenes are only one or two million years old, our earliest after-the-apes ancestors didn't move into this scene so much as they evolved with it, as the slower climate changes and uplift produced more grass and less forest.
-
Why run? I run because I am an animal. I run because it is part of my genetic wiring. I run because millions of years of evolution have left me programmed to run. And finally, I run because there’s no better way to see the sun rise and set... What the years have shown me is that running clarifies the thinking process as well as purifies the body. I think best - most broadly and most fully - when I am running.
-
The first point one has to get straight in discussions like this, is that ID is not the opposite of evolution. Rather, it is the opposite of Darwinism, which says life evolved by an utterly unguided, undirected mechanism. If god directed the process of evolution, or rigged the universe to produce complex life, then that is not Darwinism - it is intelligent design.
-
Evolution and creationism both require faith. It's just a matter of where you choose to place that faith.
-
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.
-
In terms of size, mammals are an anomaly, as the vast majority of the world's existing species are snail-sized or smaller. It's almost as if, regardless of your kingdom, the smaller your size & the earlier your place on the tree of life, the more critical is your niche on Earth: snails & worms create soil, & blue-green algae create oxygen; mammals seem comparatively dispensable, the result of the random path of evolution over a luxurious amount of time.
-
I have this amateur side attraction to, and interest in, the sciences and biology and physics and evolution. Paleontology is of interest to me. I'm interested in the way these fields have helped us understand how we are human and why we are human. I'm also from the area that is considered to be the cradle of mankind.
-
The natural philosophy of the new developments in the sciences is a systems philosophy. When properly articulated, it can give us both factual and normative knowledge. Exploring such knowledge and applying it in determining our future is an opportunity we cannot afford to miss. For if we do not, another chapter of terrestrial evolution will come to an end, and its unique experiment with rational consciousness will be written off as a failure.
-
Creationist critics often charge that evolution cannot be tested, and therefore cannot be viewed as a properly scientific subject at all. This claim is rhetorical nonsense.
-
"Methodological naturalism" and "metaphysical naturalism" are terms that often surface in the continuing battle between evolutionary biology and creationism/intelligent design. The methodological thesis says that scientific theories shouldn't postulate supernatural entities; the metaphysical thesis says that no such entities exist. In this debate, God is the supernatural entity at issue; the question isn't whether science gets to talk about mathematical entities if Platonism is correct.
-
Evolution seems to close the heart to some of the plainest spiritual truths while it opens the mind to the wildest guesses advanced in the name of science.
-
Those early steps are very important in understanding the evolution. But in themselves, maybe now you need the later records to understand the significance of the earlier records!
-
Evolution doesn't care whether you believe in it or not, no more than gravity does. I want to rekindle excitement over what we've achieved as a species with the space program. We can't afford to regress back to the days of superstition.
-
My mission is to tell the story of the birth of ourselves as a universal humanity, awakening all of us to our unique opportunity to participate through our own conscious evolution.
-
Matter is the evolution of energy. First there is thought, then there is thought form, and then there is matter. Matter is only thought that has been thought upon by more.
-
Evolution is the most popular way we have for dealing with change.
-
The temptation to believe that the Universe is the product of some sort of design, a manifestation of subtle aesthetic and mathematical judgment, is overwhelming. The belief that there is "something behind it all" is one that I personally share with, I suspect, a majority of physicists.
-
As to harmonizing the theory of evolution with the Biblical account of creation, I do not believe it can be done, and I do not see why it should be. The story of Genesis is beautiful, and profoundly significant as symbolism: there is no good reason to torture it into conformity with modern theory.
