Richard Owen Quotes

Unfortunately, with dinosaurs, we haven't had enough specimens to determine how much variation there is within a species.

A creationist can embarrass an evolutionist by asking for a definition of species.

Darwin didn't walk around the Galapagos and come up with the theory of evolution. He was exploring, collecting, making observations. It wasn't until he got back and went through the samples that he noticed the differences among them and put them in context.

It was implicitly supposed that every living thing was distinctively plant or animal; that there were real and profound differences between the two, if only they could be seized.

I encourage people who don't believe in evolution to look for horses in Jurassic Solenhofen limestone.

It was always understood that plants and animals, though completely contrasted in their higher representatives, approached each other very closely in their lower and simpler forms. But they were believed not to blend.

Darwin investigated the numerous facts obtained by naturalists in living nature and analysed them through the prism of practical experience.

The creationists repeatedly assert that evolution is a theory, and, indeed, not a scientific theory at all because it is unable to predict future developments. Both statements are untrue. Evolution [phenomenon] is a fact, not theory. It once was a theory but today, as a consequence of observation and testing it is probably the best authenticated actu- ality known to science. There are theories concerning the mechanisms of evolution but no competent student doubts the reality of evolution

Evolution has been observed. It's just that it hasn't been observed while it's happening.

I got interested in palaeontology and vertebrate history - sparked by books on human evolution - then vertebrate evolution. Studying with palaeontologists kindled my interest in fieldwork.

It was a shock to people of the nineteenth century when they discovered, from observations science had made, that many features of the biological world could be ascribed to the elegant principle of natural selection.

I was brought up to understand Darwin's theory of evolution. I spent hours and hours in the Natural History Museum in London looking at the descriptions of how different kinds of animals had evolved, looking at the sequence of fossil bones looking gradually more and more and more and more like the modern fossil.

I think that many of my ideas are correct, but I'll bet you, before my death other discoveries will be made that will prompt me to alter various ideas I have about human evolution.

Evolution isn't true, because if we evolved from monkeys, how can they still be here?

No naturalist has devoted more painstaking attention to the structure of the barnacles than Mr. Darwin.

With evolution, things are always changing, so I sort of think: Should we all be growing three heads?

Evolution is one of the two or three most primally fascinating subjects in all the sciences.

Sadly, I have found that even evolution's most staunch believers are afraid to debate, because they know that their case for atheism and evolution is less than extremely weak.

The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin.

My own field of paleontology has strongly challenged the Darwinian premise that life's major transformations can be explained by adding up, through the immensity of geological time, the successive tiny changes produced generation after generation by natural selection.

Unless one is a religious fundamentalist and believes that man was created in the image and likeness of God, it is foolish to believe that human beings are exempt from biological classification and the laws of evolution that apply to all other life forms.

A race is what zoologists term a variety or subdivision of a species.

A major fault, for example, is the fact that, along with the materialist principle, Darwin introduced into his theory of evolution reactionary Malthusian ideas.

The former conviction that these two kingdoms were wholly different in structure, in function, and in kind of life, was not seriously disturbed by the difficulties which the naturalist encountered when he undertook to define them.

The trick is: how do you talk about natural selection without implying the rigidity of law? We use it as almost an active participant, almost like a god. In fact, you could substitute the word 'god' for 'natural selection' in a lot of evolutionary writings and you'd think you were listening to a theologian.