Evolution Concept Quotes

The great word Evolution had not yet, in 1860, made a new religion of history, but the old religion had preached the same doctrinefor a thousand years without finding in the entire history of Rome anything but flat contradiction.

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.

Evolution is an inference from thousands of independent sources, the only conceptual structure that can make unified sense of all this disparate information.

If I were to give a prize for the single best idea anybody ever had, I'd give it to Darwin for the idea of natural selection - ahead of Newton, ahead of Einstein - because his idea unites the two most disparate features of our universe: the world of purposeless, meaningless matter and motion, particles jostling on the one side, and the world of meaning and purpose, design on the other.

Evolution is not a force but a process. Not a cause but a law.

Evolution does not attempt to explain the origin of life. It is simply a history of the process of life. With the secret cause of life evolution has nothing to do. A man, therefore, may be a materialistic evolutionist or a theistic evolutionist; that is, he may believe that the cause is some single unintelligent impersonal force, or he may believe that the cause is a wise and beneficent God.

Of course, there is no reconciliation between the theory of evolution by natural selection and the traditional religious view of the origin of the human mind.

The fact - not theory - that evolution has occurred and the Darwinian theory as to how it occurred have become so confused in popular opinion that the distinction must be stressed.

One aspect of this is the way we have come during recent centuries to appreciate that the world and indeed the very universe in which we live have evolved over immense periods of time.

If you go back and look, a completely underrated film is 'Quest for Fire.' That was one of the most genius, simplistic but incredibly sophisticated notion of what it was. The evolution of that was just fantastic.

The concept of evolution postulates that living organisms have common roots, and in turn, the existence of common features is powerful support for the concept of evolution.

Essential to the theory of evolution is the premise that everything has come into being by itself.

Aristotle especially, both by speculation and observation... reached something like the modern idea of a succession of higher organizations from lower, and made the fruitful suggestion of "a perfecting principle" in Nature. With the coming in of Christian theology this tendency toward a yet truer theory of evolution was mainly stopped, but the old crude view remained.

Evolution is a light illuminating all facts, a curve that all lines must follow.

In the science, Evolution is a theory about changes; in the myth it is a fact about improvements.

What! Did Sir W[alter] R[aleigh] believe that a male and female ounce (and, if so, why not two tigers and lions, etc?) would have produced, in a course of generations, a cat, or a cat a lion? This is Darwinizing with a vengeance.

It gives evolutionary biologists great status if they champion competition and the economists have to consult them. The economists have to consult the evolutionary biologists, because they are the ones who invented the idea of competition. It comes from the field of evolution.

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.

Well, everything is constantly evolving and changing. That's what life is all about. But basically Hollywood has lost its focus as a film center. Films are now made all over the world.

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

Natural selection is not an inflammatory phrase; evolution is.

New knowledge has led to the recognition in the theory of evolution of more than a hypothesis. It is indeed remarkable that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge. The convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favor of this theory.

I find the idea of common descent (that all organisms share a common ancestor) fairly convincing, and have no particular reason to doubt it.

Evolution, of course, is not something that simply applies to life here on earth; it applies to the whole universe.

According to the concept of transformational evolution, first clearly articulated by Lamarck, evolution consists of the gradual transformation of organisms from one condition of existence to another.