Darwin quotes:

Send

People say I am against Darwin. That is ridiculous. -- Lynn Margulis
My theory of evolution is that Darwin was adopted. -- Steven Wright
We should not live by Darwinian principles. But Darwin explains how we got here. -- Richard Dawkins
The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin. -- Henry Adams
If you have Darwin, Christ and Nietzsche, they're all going to talk at once. You need somebody who listens. -- David Duchovny
Marathon running, for me, was the most controlled test of mettle that I could ever think of. It's you against Darwin. -- Ryan Reynolds
As Darwin himself was at pains to point out, natural selection is all about differential survival within species, not between them. -- Richard Dawkins
Every one of my positions cuts - out half the country. I'm pro-choice, I'm pro-gay rights, I'm pro-immigration, I'm against guns, I believe in Darwin. -- Michael Bloomberg
The people who had the most impact on me when I was young were Freud and Darwin, but growing up I also had my film idols. -- Hugh Hefner
Mr. Darwin refers to the multitude of the individual of every species, which, from one cause or another, perish either before, or soon after attaining maturity. -- Richard Owen
Before Darwin, our world was very religious. People saw altruism as something given by God for us to be good so that we could go to Paradise. -- Isabella Rossellini
Some women can't stand being pregnant, getting big and bloated, and hauling around a giant stomach, and some women, for reasons probably understood by Darwin, love it. -- Rich Cohen
We adore babies because they're so cute. And, of course, we are amused by jokes because they are funny. This is all backwards. It is. And Darwin shows us why. -- Daniel Dennett
As a citizen, as a public scientist, I can tell you that Einstein essentially overturned a so strongly established paradigm of science, whereas Darwin didn't really overturn a science paradigm. -- Neil deGrasse Tyson
Even when Darwin's teaching first made its appearance, it became clear at once that its scientific, materialist core, its teaching concerning the evolution of living nature, was antagonistic to the idealism that reigned in biology. -- Trofim Lysenko
Ever since Darwin, we've been familiar with the stupendous timespans of the evolutionary past. But most people still somehow think we humans are necessarily the culmination of the evolutionary tree. No astronomer could believe this. -- Martin Rees
Darwin 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 Waal
I hope I may have succeeded in presenting to you, however imperfectly, the currents of thought due to the work of the immortal Darwin which have helped to make anthropology what it is at the present time. -- Franz Boas
In Darwin's time all of biology was a black box: not only the cell, or the eye, or digestion, or immunity, but every biological structure and function because, ultimately, no one could explain how biological processes occurred. -- Michael Behe
Charles Darwin sailed around the world for two years on the 'Beagle,' and he had quite a bit of interest in things like the iguanas of the Galapagos, even though they were primitive compared to your average Englishman. -- Seth Shostak
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. -- Terry Pratchett
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. -- John Shelby Spong
Thank God for Darwin, eh? -- Bill Bailey
Darwin was wrong. Man's still an ape -- Jerome Lawrence
I believe in Darwin and God together. -- Ray Bradbury
Clausius and Darwin cannot both be right. -- Roger Caillois
Darwin was as much of an emancipator as was Lincoln. -- William Graham Sumner
The Descent of Darwin: A Handbook of Doubts about Darwinism, -- Errol White
Darwin has interested us in the history of nature's technology. -- Karl Marx
Darwin himself recorded the fact that he accepted the Malthusian idea. -- Trofim Lysenko
How do you know that God didn't speak to Charles Darwin? -- Jack Lemmon
I can use the teachings of [Charles] Darwin to promote communism. -- Rafael Cruz
I think that I could see Darwin having a relationship with Asia. -- Susan Oliver
And there hasn't been much progress in Darwinism since [the life of Darwin]. -- Ben Stein
Evolution thus is merely contingent on certain processes articulated by Darwin: variation and selection. -- Ernst Mayr
What Galileo and Newton were to the seventeenth century, Darwin was to the nineteenth. -- Bertrand Russell
Those who think 'Science is Measurement' should search Darwin's works for numbers and equations. -- David H. Hubel
Darwin's idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition. -- Daniel Dennett
Ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transitions than we had in Darwin's time. -- David M. Raup
It was Herbert Spencer, not Charles Darwin, who coined the phrase Survival of the Fittest. -- John Kenneth Galbraith
For all the creationists out there, Darwin's just an atheist. But he was actually agnostic. -- Henry Ian Cusick
Darwin has done more to change human thought than all the priests who have existed. -- Robert Green Ingersoll
In my view all salvation for philosophy may be expected to come from Darwin's theory -- Ludwig Boltzmann
No naturalist has devoted more painstaking attention to the structure of the barnacles than Mr. Darwin. -- Richard Owen
It seems to me that for Darwin the pulsing of evolutionary rates was a strictly vertical phenomenon. -- Ernst Mayr
Charles Darwin viewed the fossil record more as an embarrassment than as an aid to his theory ... -- Stephen Jay Gould
--
Philosophers who pay for their semantics by drawing checks on Darwin are in debt way over their heads. -- Jerry Fodor
You must remember that you are my prime treasure (and always have been).'Emma Darwin to husband Charles -- Deborah Heiligman
Darwin abolished special creations, contributed the Origin of Species and hitched all life together in one unbroken procession." -- Mark Twain
Darwin abolished special creations, contributed the Origin of Species and hitched all life together in one unbroken procession. -- Mark Twain
Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. -- Richard Dawkins
Darwin begins by assuming life upon the earth; the Bible reveals the source of life and chronicles its creation. -- William Jennings Bryan
All the professors in all the religious colleges in this country rolled into one, would not equal Charles Darwin. -- Robert Green Ingersoll
Charles Darwin wrote a famous book in 18 gibberish. And that book was an interesting book, cuz it was called "Monkey-Monkey-Monkey-Monkey-Monkey-Monkey-You" -- Eddie Izzard
Darwinism as presented by Darwin contradicted idealistic philosophy, and this contradiction grew deeper with the development of its materialist teaching. -- Trofim Lysenko
Our own species evolved under the influence of group selection, as Darwin emphasized when he discussed the evolution of altruism. -- Elliott Sober
Darwin investigated the numerous facts obtained by naturalists in living nature and analysed them through the prism of practical experience. -- Trofim Lysenko
We shall me much less miserable together.' -Emma Darwin to husband Charles upon grief for loss of daughter Annie -- Deborah Heiligman
In China we can criticize Darwin but not the government. In America you can criticize the government but not Darwin. -- Phillip E. Johnson
If you found a mammal with feathers, then you'd know that Darwin was wrong. Well, it's rather the same with memes. -- Susan Blackmore
There is in fact a controversy over Darwin's theory. Clearly both theories have religious implications. But this is not about God. -- Richard Thompson
Along with William Shakespeare and Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin is Britain's greatest gift to the world. He was our greatest thinker. -- Richard Dawkins
--
We shall certainly not advance matters by jumping up and down shrilling, 'Darwin is god and I, so-and-so, am his prophet. -- Errol White
If Charles Darwin reappeared today, he might be surprised to learn that humans are descended from viruses as well as from apes. -- Robin A. Weiss
Darwin paid particular attention to disconfirming evidence. Objectivity maintenance routines are totally required in life if you're going to be a great thinker. -- Charlie Munger
Oh my God, calm down, Darwin. Don't get all crazy just 'cause I threw a vampire monkey wrench in your faulty Jesus-zombie logic." -- Jenny Lawson
All mammals undergo a certain degree of diversification. Darwin knew that. When he drew a family tree, it had many branches on it. -- Donald Johanson
We must be more and more to each other, my dear wife.' -Charles Darwin to wife Emma upon loss of daughter Annie -- Deborah Heiligman
Despite some remaining puzzles, there's no reason to doubt that Darwin had this point right, that all creatures on earth are biological relatives -- Michael Behe
Even Charles Darwin, that human decoder ring of bizarre behavior, found the idea of saving a stranger's life to be a total head-scratcher. -- Christopher McDougall
250,000 species of plants and animals recorded and deposited in museums throughout the world did not support the gradual unfolding hoped for by Darwin. -- David M. Raup
A major fault, for example, is the fact that, along with the materialist principle, Darwin introduced into his theory of evolution reactionary Malthusian ideas. -- Trofim Lysenko
In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth." Sorry, Darwin-huggers, but it's not "In the beginning, a monkey evolutioned gay marriage. -- Stephen Colbert
Today Charles Darwin is best known for establishing the fact of evolution and for recognizing the major role of natural selection in driving it. -- Jared Diamond
If you take Darwin's theory and extend it to its logical end, it can be used to justify a number of very horrendous things. -- Kirk Cameron
The big picture, I think, is that common ancestry is evidentially prior to natural selection in Darwin's theory and in contemporary evolutionary biology as well. -- Elliott Sober
Darwin believed in intellectual progress, but he believed that it would come smoothly and harmoniously and happily and it would eventually cover the whole world. -- James Moore
Even if not a single fossil has ever been found, the evidence from surviving animals would still overwhelmingly force the conclusion that Darwin was right. -- Richard Dawkins
[Charles] Darwin, for example, is the one who made us face the fact that the primary way we tell the Christ story doesn't work anymore. -- John Shelby Spong
People still don't get how astounding Darwinism is. People think what shocked everybody was that Charles Darwin seemed to be saying we had descended from apes. -- Stephen Fry
Charles Darwin got totally hammered, woke up next to a monkey and decided he had to come up with a theory to make it all okay. -- Stephen Colbert
If Darwin had seen in life what Dostoevsky saw, he would not have talked of the law of the preservation of species, but of its destruction. -- Lev Shestov
We now have many of the answers that once eluded Darwin, thanks to two developments that he could not have imagined: continental drift and molecular taxonomy. -- Jerry A. Coyne
But, as we have before been led to remark, most of Mr. Darwin's statements elude, by their vagueness and incompleteness, the test of Natural History facts. -- Richard Owen
Peer reviewers go for orthodoxy ... Many of the great 19th-century discoveries were made by men who had independent wealth-Charles Darwin is the prototype. They trusted themselves. -- James Black
I was aware of Darwin's views fourteen years before I adopted them and I have done so solely andentirely from an independent study of the plants themselves. -- Joseph Dalton Hooker
As the number of unexplained, irreducibly complex biological systems increases, our confidence that Darwin's criterion of failure has been met skyrockets toward the maximum that science allows. -- Michael Behe
But sequence comparisons simply can't account for the development of complex biochemical systems any more than Darwin's comparison of simple and complex eyes told him how vision worked. -- Michael Behe
Darwin's dice have rolled badly for Earth. The human species is, in a word, an environmental abnormality. Perhaps a law of evolution is that intelligence usually extinguishes itself. -- E. O. Wilson
To put it simply, no Darwin, no Hitler. Hitler tried to speed up evolution, to help it along, and millions suffered and died in unspeakable ways because of it. -- D. James Kennedy
Indeed, not all attacks-especially the bitter and ridiculing kind leveled at Darwin-are offered in good faith, but for practical purposes it is good policy to assume that they are. -- Hans Selye
Darwin was a biological evolutionist, because he was first a uniformitarian geologist. Biology is pre-eminent to-day among the natural sciences, because its younger sister, Geology, gave it the means. -- Darwin
Only a few years ago there was no person too ignorant to successfully answer Charles Darwin; and the more ignorant he was the more cheerfully he undertook the task. -- Robert Green Ingersoll
I am a big believer of what Darwin discovered in the Galapagos, proving that the species most responsive to change will survive over apparently stronger or more intelligent competitors. -- John Elkann
Darwin gives courage to the rest of science that we shall end up understanding literally everything, springing from almost nothing - a thought extremely hard to comprehend and believe. -- Richard Dawkins
I expect to think that I would rather be author of your book [The Origin of Species] than of any other on Nat. Hist. Science.[Letter to Charles Darwin 12 Dec 1859] -- Joseph Dalton Hooker
Prison is the only place, where Darwin's Theory of Evolution may seem to work. Survival of the fittest does only work, where the fittest is defined as the most loving. -- Raphael Zernoff
We now have a quarter of a million fossil species, but the situation hasn't changed much... We have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin's time. -- David M. Raup
It's an established fact. Some women can't stand being pregnant, getting big and bloated, and hauling around a giant stomach, and some women, for reasons probably understood by Darwin, love it. -- Rich Cohen
To shoot a man because one disagrees with his interpretation of Darwin or Hegel is a sinister tribute to the supremacy of ideas in human affairs -- but a tribute nevertheless. -- George Steiner
Intelligent design cannot explain Darwinian evolution. Darwin's whole point is that variation and change are random and without higher purpose. We cannot imagine that God designed this disproof of His own existence. -- James K. Galbraith
Mr. Darwin ... has failed to hold definitely before his mind the principle that the difference of sex, whatever it may consist in, must itself be subject to natural selection and to evolution. -- Antoinette Brown Blackwell
Biology has progressed tremendously due to the model that Darwin put forth. But the black boxes Darwin accepted are now being opened, and our view of the world is again being shaken. -- Michael Behe
Mr. Darwin contributes some striking and ingenious instances of the way in which the principle partially affects the chain, or rather network of life, even to the total obliteration of certain meshes. -- Richard Owen
I am one who believes that the world goes from the slime to the sublime. And you can take Darwin and all your philosophers and all your ontologists, and that's the direction. -- Mario Cuomo
If Darwin's theory should be true, it will not degrade man; it will simply raise the whole animal world into dignity, leaving man as far in advance as he is at present -- George Eliot
In private many scientists admit that science has no explanation for the beginning of life.... Darwin never imagined the exquisitely profound complexity that exists even at the most basic levels of life. -- Michael Behe
I am not satisfied that Darwin proved his point or that his influence in scientific and public thinking has been beneficial ... the success of Darwinism was accomplished by a decline in scientific integrity. -- W. R. Thompson
Religious reasons, which is no reason. I notice Skeptic had a review of Dennett's book, Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Religious reasons amount to what Dennett terms "skyhooks." Do you believe in skyhooks? I don't. -- Garrett Hardin
Many prominent scientists - including Darwin, Einstein, and Planck - have considered the concept of God very seriously. What are your thoughts on the concept of God and on the existence of God? -- Christian B. Anfinsen
I was aware of Darwin's views fourteen years before I adopted them and I have done so solely and entirely from an independent study of the plants themselves.[Letter to W.H. Harvey] -- Joseph Dalton Hooker
The four most influential moderns: Darwin, Marx, Freud, and (the productive) Einstein were scholars but not academics. It has always been hard to do genuine - and no perishable - work within institutions -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A remarkable parallel, which I think has never been noticed, obtains between the facts of social evolution on the one hand, and of zological evolution as expounded by Mr. Darwin on the other. -- William James
It is extraordinary the extent to which Darwin's insights not only changed his contemporaries' view of the world but also continue to be a source of great intellectual stimulation for scientists and nonscientists alike. -- James D. Watson
Darwin may have been quite correct in his theory that man descended from the apes of the forest, but surely woman rose from the frothy sea, as resplendent as Aphrodite on her scalloped chariot. -- Margot Datz
Legendary innovators like Franklin, Snow, and Darwin all possess some common intellectual qualities?a certain quickness of mind, unbounded curiosity?but they also share one other defining attribute. They have a lot of hobbies. -- Steven Johnson
Darwin abolished special creations, contributed the Origin of Species and hitched all life together in one unbroken procession of Siamese Twins, the whole evolved by natural and orderly processes from one microscopic parent germ. -- Mark Twain
There's a joke in everything, the trick is finding it. The best compliment a joke can get is what Huxley said about Darwin's theory of evolution - 'Why didn't I think of that?' -- Emo Philips

Send