David Deutsch Quotes

Most species do their own evolving, making it up as they go along, which is the way Nature intended.

The story of evolution unfolds with increasing levels of abstraction.

It was Darwin's chief contribution, not only to Biology but to the whole of natural science, to have brought to light a process by which contingencies a priori improbable, are given, in the process of time, an increasing probability, until it is their non-occurrence rather than their occurrence which becomes highly improbable.

Most species do their own evolving, making it up as they go along, which is the way Nature intended. And this is all very natural and organic and in tune with mysterious cycles of the cosmos, which believes that there's nothing like millions of years of really frustrating trial and error to give a species moral fiber and, in some cases, backbone.

I am an enthusiastic Darwinian, but I think Darwinism is too big a theory to be confined to the narrow context of the gene.

That's evolution. Evolution's always hard. Hard and bleak. No such thing as happy evolution

Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me. This is easy to write, easy to read, and hard to believe.

There's nothing nonsensical about saying that what would evolve if Darwinian selection has its head is something that you don't want to happen. And I could easily imagine trying to go against Darwinism.

You know what, evolution is a myth. ... Why aren't monkeys still evolving into humans?

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.

Evolution is the fundamental idea in all of life science - in all of biology.

The idea that you would affect evolution is a very profound thing.

Natural selection is not evolution.

Natural selection eliminates and maybe maintains, but it doesn't create.

We are the product of 4.5 billion years of fortuitous, slow biological evolution. There is no reason to think that the evolutionary process has stopped. Man is a transitional animal. He is not the climax of creation.

The Theory of Evolution has been proved true

The Theory of Evolution has had over a million chances to be wrong, but never has been.

The theory of evolution, like the theory of gravity, is a scientific fact.

Your creatures can come into being only, like shoot from stem, as part of an endlessly renewed process of evolution.

The fossil record implies trial and error, an inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with an efficient Great Designer (although not with a Designer of a more remote and indirect temperament)

I have always had this basic biological question in terms of evolution, if the drive to evolution is to like survive. An organism that survives well, there is really no need for consciousness in there.

Darwin has interested us in the history of nature's technology.

Nature doesn't see things through the prism of good or bad. It rewards efficiency. That is the simplicity of evolution, matching design to environment.

Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is the only workable explanation that has ever been proposed for the remarkable fact of our own existence, indeed the existence of all life wherever it may turn up in the universe.

The secrets of evolution are death and time-the deaths of enormous numbers of lifeforms that were imperfectly adapted to the environment; and time for a long succession of small mutations.