Jane Wagner Quotes

I live on the other side of Charles Darwin and I can no longer see human light as having been created perfect and falling into sin, I see us rather emerging into higher and higher levels of consciousness and higher and higher levels of complication.

The progress of evolution, from President Washington to President Grant, was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin.... Grant should have lived in a cave and worn skins.

… the action of natural selection upon Man has ... been essentially diminished through the operation of social conditions

I think almost everything about humans and human civilization is explained better by evolution than anything else.

We're supposed to keep evolving. Evolution did not end with us growing opposable thumbs. You do know that, right?

Organs, faculties, powers, capacities, or whatever else we call them; grow by use and diminish from disuse, it is inferred that they will continue to do so. And if this inference is unquestionable, then is the one above deduced from it-that humanity must in the end become completely adapted to its conditions-unquestionable also. Progress, therefore, is not an accident, but a necessity.

Obviously it depends on how you define a word like "evolution," because of course we have been evolving - both biologically and culturally - in relation to the natural world for hundreds of thousands of years.

If there were no Adam and Eve and we’re all evolved from apelike ancestors and there’s homosexuality in the animal world and if Genesis is mythology, then you can justify any behavior you want.

We should not live by Darwinian principles. But Darwin explains how we got here.

I've written a number of books that have to do with the evolution of humans, human intelligence, human emotions.

We are a very, very unusual species.

Humanity at the centre of the primates, Homo sapiens, in humanity, is the end-product of a gradual work of creation, the successive sketches for which still surround us on every side.

We are the species who cooks. No other species cooks. And when we learned to cook, we became truly human.

I'm a Darwinian.

Humans are just a very, very small part of the panoply of life, and it is arguable that in a certain sense, humans have emancipated themselves from Darwinian selection.

If Darwin's theories are true, then we have within us the physical memory of when we were fish or apes.

The point of human evolution is adapting to circumstance. Not letting go of the old, but adapting it, is necessary.

The logical outcome of evolution is that it makes monsters. We turn into monsters because evolution takes away everything that makes us human in the sense of our moral accountability, our moral absolutes, and our idea of being distinct from the animal kingdom.

It is nature that is driving us towards perfection, and eventually she will bring everyone there.

It takes a long time before we really get to grips with this [Darwin's 'On the Origin of Species'] and begin to understand it, because not only does it seem incredible and thoroughly demeaning to us, but it's yet another shock to our system to discover that not only are we not the centre of the Universe and we're not made by anything, but we started out as some kind of slime and got to where we are via being a monkey. It just doesn't read well.

Humanity unceasingly strives forward from a lower, more partial and obscure understanding of life to one more general and more lucid.

The Darwinian revolution is about essence. The Darwinian revolution is about who we are, it's what we're made of, it's what our life means insofar as science can answer that question.

If evolution was worth its salt, by now it should've evolved something better than survival of the fittest. I think a better idea would be survival of the wittiest.

As evolutionary time is measured, we have only just turned up and have hardly had time to catch breath, still marveling at our thumbs, still learning to use the brand-new gift of language. Being so young, we can be excused all sorts of folly and can permit ourselves the hope that someday, as a species, we will begin to grow up.

When things get bad enough, then something happens to correct the course. And it's for that reason that I speak about evolution as an error-making and an error-correcting process. And if we can be ever so much better - ever so much slightly better - at error correcting than at error making, then we'll make it.