A collection of proverbs and quotes about evolution.
Showing results 1 to 39 of 39
All the different life forms that share our planet are our relatives.
Paul NurseSource: What Is Life?: Five Great Ideas in Biology
Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.
Richard DawkinsAn animal is the way it is because it needs to be.
(unknown author)Both Darwin and Turing claim to have discovered something truly unsettling to a human mind — competence without comprehension.
Daniel DennettComplex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things.
Richard DawkinsDarwin wasn't just provocative in saying that we descend from the apes - he didn't go far enough. We are apes in every way, from our long arms and tailless bodies to our habits and temperament.
Frans de WaalDomesticated chickens and cattle may well be an evolutionary success story, but they are also among the most miserable creatures that ever lived. The domestication of animals was founded on a series of brutal practices that only became crueller with the passing of the centuries.
Yuval Noah HarariSource: A Brief History of Humankind
Everything is what it is because it got that way.
D'Arcy Wentworth ThompsonEvolution is a process that depends on amplifying things that almost never happen.
Daniel DennettEvolution is cleverer than you are.
Leslie OrgelOrgel's Second Rule
Evolution is not a force but a process. Not a cause but a law.
John MorleyEvolution is now universally accepted as a fact by thinking people
Richard DawkinsEvolution never looks to the future.
Richard DawkinsEvolution tells us where we came from, not where we can go.
Jerry CoyneGiven infinite time, or infinite opportunities, anything is possible.
Richard DawkinsHumans are an integral part of nature, the result of unguided evolutionary change.
American Humanist AssociationSource: Humanism and Its Aspirations
I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars.
Charles DarwinI'm not getting old. I'm evolving.
Keith RichardsIf my genes don't like it, they can jump in the lake.
Steven PinkerSource: How the mind works
Is there an evolution of evolvability?
Richard DawkinsIt has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
Arthur C. ClarkeIt is not clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value.
Stephen HawkingIt is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change.
Leon C. MegginsonMy eyes are constantly wide open to the extraordinary fact of existence. Not just human existence, but the existence of life and how this breathtakingly powerful process, which is natural selection, has managed to take the very simple facts of physics and chemistry and build them up to redwood trees and humans.
Richard DawkinsMy personal feeling is that understanding evolution led me to atheism.
Richard DawkinsNatural selection is anything but random.
Richard DawkinsNatural selection will not remove ignorance from future generations.
Richard DawkinsPeople can believe in evolution without understanding it, and vice versa.
Steven PinkerSource: Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
Slow, gradual, cumulative natural selection is the ultimate explanation for our existence.
Richard DawkinsSome people would claim that things like love, joy and beauty belong to a different category from science and can't be described in scientific terms, but I think they can now be explained by the theory of evolution.
Stephen HawkingThe difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind.
Charles DarwinSource: The Descent of Man
The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.
Vladimir NabokovThe first step in the evolution of ethics is a sense of solidarity with other human beings.
Albert SchweitzerThe rabbit runs faster than the fox, because the rabbit is running for his life, while the fox is only running for his dinner.
Richard DawkinsTruth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.
Oscar WildeWe admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realise that we are apes.
Richard DawkinsWe are a very, very unusual species.
Richard DawkinsWe did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us.
Yuval Noah HarariSource: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
What is the evolutionary value of blushing?
Frans de Waal