John Burroughs Quotes

Many people, whether religious believers or not, were repelled by the idea that we humans are nothing more special than a species of mammal directly descended from the higher primates, and that we achieved that status by winning a long struggle, shockingly red, as Tennyson famously put it, “in tooth and claw

Instead of holding on to the Biblical view that we are made in the image of God, we come to realize that we are made in the image of the monkey.

First, Darwinian theory tells us how a certain amount of diversity in life forms can develop once we have various types of complex living organisms already in existence.

I'd love to meet Darwin. He caused such controversy over whether God created the earth in six days or whether we evolved over time. I'd love to discuss that with him - what a fantastic conversation!

A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known.

It is hard for the ape to believe he descended from man.

It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.

It is disturbing to discover in oneself these curious revelations of the validity of the Darwinian theory. If it is true that we have sprung from the ape, there are occasions when my own spring appears not to have been very far.

Would it be too bold to imagine that, in the great length of time since the earth began to exist, perhaps millions of ages before the commencement of the history of mankind would it be too bold to imagine that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament, which the great First Cause endued with animality, with the power of acquiring new parts, attended with new propensities, directed by irritations, sensations, volitions and associations, and thus possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down these improvements by generation to its posterity, world without end!

Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.

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.

I have often said that I am a passionate Darwinian when it comes to explaining why we exist.

If God used evolution, God came from an ape.

People are still very uncomfortable with the idea that humans are not specially created species. I believe we are a fantastic species. But we are not created specially. That's very hard for people to accept in their day-to-day routine.

There's a theory that says that life is based on a competition and the struggle and the fight for survival, and it's interesting because when you look at the fractal character of evolution, it's totally different. It's based on cooperation among the elements in the geometry and not competition.

Man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits.

Darwin himself recorded the fact that he accepted the Malthusian idea.

Natural selection certainly operates. It explains how bacteria will gain antibiotic resistance; it will explain how insects get insecticide resistance, but it doesn't explain how you get bacteria or insects in the first place.

I don't think there was a thunderclap or a divine spark that suddenly made one species smart. You can see, in our ancestors, there was a gradual expansion of the brain; there was an expansion of the complexity of tools.

The uniformity of the earth's life, more astonishing than its diversity, is accountable by the high probability that we derived, originally, from some single cell, fertilized in a bolt of lightning as the earth cooled.

For me, the level at which natural selection causes the phenomenon of adaptation is the level of the replicator - the gene.

Darwinism is not merely a support for naturalistic philosophy: it is a product of naturalistic philosophy.

A probing analysis of the problems of evolution forms the basis of my prose.

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.

Evolution was far more thrilling to me than the biblical account. Who would not rather be a rising ape than a falling angel? To my juvenile eyes, Darwin was proved true every day. It doesn't take much to make us flip back into monkeys again.