Darwinian quotes:

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Creativity can only be anarchic, capitalist, Darwinian. -- Umberto Eco
We should not live by Darwinian principles. But Darwin explains how we got here. -- Richard Dawkins
The human brain is built to compare; it's Darwinian to consider an alternative when one presents itself. -- Helen Fisher
I have often said that I am a passionate Darwinian when it comes to explaining why we exist. -- Richard Dawkins
The idea that being human and having rights are equivalent - that rights are inherent - is unintelligible in a Darwinian world. -- Tom Stoppard
Every major religion today is a winner in the Darwinian struggle waged among cultures, and none ever flourished by tolerating its rivals. -- E. O. Wilson
There is no refutation of Darwinian evolution in existence. If a refutation ever were to come about, it would come from a scientist, and not an idiot. -- Richard Dawkins
There is an immediate payoff to intelligent design: it destroys the atheistic legacy of Darwinian evolution. Intelligent design makes it impossible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. -- William A. Dembski
The monopoly of science in the realm of knowledge explains why evolutionary biologists do not find it meaningful to address the question whether the Darwinian theory is true. -- Phillip E. Johnson
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. -- Phillip E. Johnson
Modernist architecture and town planning is inimical to human beings... based on the Darwinian concept that evolution is open ended, that there must always be something new and better. -- Leon Krier
Humans are just a very, very small part of the panoply of life, and it is arguable that in a certain sense, humans have emancipated themselves from Darwinian selection. -- Richard Dawkins
From a Darwinian perspective, it is clear what pain is doing. It's a warning: 'Don't do that again.' If you burn yourself, you're never going to pick up a live coal again. -- Richard Dawkins
I think many people are terribly afraid of being demoted by the Darwinian scheme from the role of authors and creators in their own right into being just places where things happen in the universe. -- Daniel Dennett
I mean it's the most objective industry in the world. If your numbers stink, you're out. If your numbers are good, you get more money. It's the most Darwinian, it's beautiful, it's brutal, it works. -- Jim Cramer
My own field of paleontology has strongly challenged the Darwinian premise that life's major transformations can be explained by adding up, through the immensity of geological time, the successive tiny changes produced generation after generation by natural selection. -- Stephen Jay Gould
The classics of Marxism, while fully appreciating the significance of the Darwinian theory, pointed out the errors of which Darwin was guilty. Darwin's theory, though unquestionably materialist in its main features, is not free from some serious errors. -- Trofim Lysenko
The interesting question would be whether there's a Darwinian process, a kind of selection process whereby some memes are more likely to spread than others, because people like them, because they're popular, because they're catchy or whatever it might be. -- Richard Dawkins
Evolutionary psychologists seem to want to unmask our noblest motives as ultimately self-interested - to show that our love for children, compassion for the unfortunate and sense of justice are just tactics in a Darwinian struggle to perpetuate our genes. -- Steven Pinker
The newly released movie 'Noah' features a retelling of the creation story that clearly depicts Darwinian evolution transforming a single-cell organism into a monkey. The movie also seems to show magic in scenes more reminiscent of the occult than of the Bible story. -- Aaron Klein
There's a misconception that survival of the fittest means survival of the most aggressive. The adjective 'Darwinian' used to refer to ruthless competition; you used to read that in business journals. But that's not what Darwinian means to a biologist; it's whatever leads to reproductive success. -- Steven Pinker
What Darwinian theory shows us is that all human races are extremely close to each other. None of them is in any sense ancestral to any other; none of them is more primitive than any other. We are all modern races of exactly equal status, evolutionarily speaking. -- Richard Dawkins
Journalism is a Darwinian process. -- Denise Mina
Things don't look hopeful for Darwinian naturalists. -- Alvin Plantinga
There's almost a Darwinian quality about the NFL. -- Steve Fainaru
Darwinian evolution has obviously not had enough time to work. -- George Hammond
In the Darwinian world, self-preservation is the ultimate shiny good. -- N.D. Wilson
A Darwinian nation of economic fitness abhors idleness, dependence, non-productivity. -- Simone de Beauvoir
Darwinian man, though well-behaved, at best is only a monkey shaved. -- W.S. Gilbert
Thermodynamics, correctly interpreted, does not just allow Darwinian evolution; it favors it. -- Ludwig Boltzmann
By the cold Darwinian logic of natural selection, evolution codifies happenstance into strategy. -- David Quammen
Darwinian evolution is unscientific, unobservable, unbelievable, but understandable in a world that hates God. -- Ray Comfort
I suppose I'd characterize myself as having a faith-based optimism. My faith is parental and Darwinian. -- Denis Hayes
stinginess seemed instinctive to him. Darwinian even. He hadn't gotten to his current size by sharing. -- Laura Lippman
It is difficult to imagine evolution in alien planets operating in any manner other than Darwinian. -- Simon Conway Morris
Technology is Darwinian. It spreads. It evolves. It adapts. The most dangerous wipes out the less fit. -- Nancy Kress
We're trying to run a 21st century society and economy with 19th century Darwinian, competitive, crude ideas. -- Susan George
Keep Darwinian thinking out of cosmology, out of psychology, out of human culture, out of ethics, politics, and religion! -- Daniel Dennett
The Daily Beast' competes in the highly Darwinian media world filled with hyper-smart, highly adaptive, tool-using people with opposable thumbs. -- Tina Brown
The Darwinian adaptive trait of our time is the ability to figure out when we are being lied to on television. -- Dick Morris
The Darwinian concept of the survival of the fittest has been substituted by a philosophy of the survival of the slickest. -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
The Darwinian movement has made no difference to mankind, except that, instead of talking unphilosophically about philosophy, they now talk unscientifically about science. -- Gilbert K. Chesterton
It would be really worrying if, as a Darwinian, it was impossible to think of ways in which our behavior could be explained. -- Richard Dawkins
Among German historians, there's really not much debate about whether or not Hitler was a social Darwinist. He clearly was drawing on Darwinian ideas. -- Richard Weikart
I am an enthusiastic Darwinian, but I think Darwinism is too big a theory to be confined to the narrow context of the gene. -- Richard Dawkins
If you take Darwinian theory, make a 'scientific' principle out of it, put it into political action, then you have something like Nazi Germany. -- Bruce Lipton
As a chemist, I wanted to ask myself the question frustrated by biology: What is the minimal unit of matter that can undergo Darwinian evolution? -- Leroy Cronin
Even if there were no actual evidence in favor of the Darwinian theory, we should still be justified in preferring it over all rival theories. -- Richard Dawkins
The Darwinian theory is in principle capable of explaining life. No other theory that has ever been suggested is in principle capable of explaining life. -- Richard Dawkins
The packaged food business environment is very Darwinian. You're fighting for survival every year; you evolve and grow or you die. It's really that simple. -- Douglas Conant
Of course language arose in a Darwinian biological world, because that's all there is, but that world relates only superficially to the pop-biology that circulates informally. -- Noam Chomsky
There's more religion in my little finger than there is in the pope. But no, I don't believe in God. I am an athiest. A Darwinian evolutionist. -- Peter Greenaway
Humans are just barely intelligent tool users; Darwinian evolutionary selection stopped when language and tool use converged, leaving the average hairy meme carrier sadly deficient in smarts. -- Charles Stross
As for modern journalism, it is not my business to defend it. It justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the vulgarest. -- Oscar Wilde
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Programs to demonstrate Darwinian evolution are akin to a pinball machine. The steel ball bounces around differently every time but eventually falls down the little hole behind the flippers. -- Robert J. Marks II
There is another kind of altruism that seems to go beyond that, a kind of super-altruism, which humans appear to have. And I think that does need a Darwinian explanation. -- Richard Dawkins
We accept that people are irrational for good Darwinian reasons. But I don't think we should be so pessimistic as to think that therefore we're forever condemned to be irrational. -- Richard Dawkins
The Darwinian revolution is about essence. The Darwinian revolution is about who we are, it's what we're made of, it's what our life means insofar as science can answer that question. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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
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. -- George Gaylord Simpson
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. -- George Gaylord Simpson
I mean, in a way, I feel that one of the reasons for learning about Darwinian evolution is as an object lesson in how not to set up our values and social lives. -- Richard Dawkins
If you feel the purpose of life is struggle, Darwinian fitness, dog eat dog, then you will be eaten by a dog, or you will eat dog. You become what you focus on. -- Frederick Lenz
Surely the mitochondrion that first entered another cell was not thinking about the future benefits of cooperation and integration; it was merely trying to make its own living in a tough Darwinian world -- Stephen Jay Gould
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. -- Richard Dawkins
If you feel the purpose of life is struggle, Darwinian fitness, dog eat dog, then you will be eaten by a dog, or you will eat dog. You become what you focus on. -- Frederick Lenz
Teaching students the evidence for and against Darwinism is not the same as teaching intelligent design. The U.S. Congress has officially endorsed teaching students 'the full range of scientific views' about Darwinian evolution. -- Jonathan Wells
If you take a more Darwinian point of view the dynamics of the universe are such that as the universe evolved in time, complex systems arose out of the natural dynamics of the universe. -- Seth Lloyd
Darwinian natural selection only yields adaptation to changing local environments, and better function in an immediate habitat might just as well be achieved by greater simplicity in form and behavior as by ever-increasing complexity. -- Stephen Jay Gould
We have long been seeking a different kind of evolutionary process and have now found one; namely, the change within the pattern of the chromosomes. ... The neo-Darwinian theory of the geneticists is no longer tenable. -- Richard Goldschmidt
Memetics provides a new approach to the evolution of language in which we apply Darwinian thinking to two replicators, not one. On this theory, memetic selection, as well as genetic selection, does the work of creating language. -- Susan Blackmore
[Evolution] doesn't mean God-guided, gradual creation. It means unguided, purposeless change. The Darwinian theory doesn't say that God created slowly. It says that naturalistic evolution is the creator, and so God had nothing to do with it. -- Philip Johnson
The modern theory of evolution does not require gradual change. It in fact, the operation of Darwinian processes should yield exactly what we see in the fossil record. It is gradualism that we must reject, not Darwinism. -- Stephen Jay Gould
As far as I can see, our concentration of different abilities in one species - there's nothing I can see that in this Darwinian evolution that could've done that. So it seems to be a miracle of some sort. -- Freeman Dyson
The greatest impact of the Darwinian revolution...was that it completed the liberation from superstition and fear that began in the physical sciences a few centuries before. Man, too, is a natural phenomenon. [in "The evolutionary concept of man", 1972, p. 35.] -- George Gaylord Simpson
Nowhere was Darwin able to point to one bona fide case of natural selection having actually generated evolutionary change in nature....Ultimately, the Darwinian theory of evolution is no more nor less than the great cosmogenic myth of the twentieth century. -- Michael Denton
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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. -- Cornelia Otis Skinner
The great thing about the business is how Darwinian it is. We have to swim or die - if you are found wanting over a period of time, you've either got to change what you're doing or find something else to do. -- Steven Soderbergh
When the theory of evolution destroyed the picture of God as the supreme Creator, confidence in God as the all-powerful Father of man fell with it, although many were able to combine a belief in God with the acceptance of the Darwinian theory. -- Erich Fromm
Capitalism, gaudy and greedy, has been inherent in western aesthetics from ancient Egypt on. It is the mysticism and glamour of things , which take on a personality of their own. As an economic system, it is in the Darwinian line of Sade, not Rousseau. -- Camille Paglia
Faith has its price. When misfortune strikes the true believer, he assumes he has done something to deserve punishment, but isn't quite certain what. The realist, recognizing that he lives in a Darwinian universe, is simply grateful to have made it to another sunset. -- Jack McDevitt
Throughout the past century there has always existed a significant minority of first-rate biologists who have never been able to bring themselves to accept the validity of Darwinian claims. In fact, the number of biologists who have expressed some degree of disillusionment is practically endless. -- Michael Denton
I think that what one can see from a Darwinian account is how the addition of culture in our species turns us into a very special sort of animal, an animal that can be a moral agent in a way that no other animal can be. -- Daniel Dennett
I think from my point of view - I won't say it doesn't matter whether [Darwinian explanations] are right or wrong, it's just sufficient in some cases, for me, to be able to say, Well, at least it's not totally implausible from a Darwinian point of view. -- Richard Dawkins
I could easily believe that religion could enhance health and hence survival, and that therefore there could be indeed be literally Darwinian survival value, Darwinian selection in favor of religion. None of that of course bears at all upon the truth value of the claims made by religions. -- Richard Dawkins
Evolutionary biologists have been able to pretend to know how complex biological systems originated only because they treated them as black boxes. Now that biochemists have opened the black boxes and seen what is inside, they know the Darwinian theory is just a story, not a scientific explanation. -- Phillip E. Johnson
All life, all intelligence, all creativity and all 'design' anywhere in the universe, is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection. It follows that design comes late in the universe, after a period of Darwinian evolution. Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe. -- Richard Dawkins
Dating Game' wasn't social commentary, political analysis, Shakespearean-level drama or even blunt-force comedy. It was just the televised equivalent of meeting someone at a bar. But it appealed to our most basic Darwinian instinct: selecting a good mate. You can't go wrong when a show's premise is hard-wired into human DNA. -- Seth Shostak
The stupendous time spans of the evolutionary past are now part of common culture (though maybe not in the United States Bible Belt, nor in parts of the Islamic world). Most people are at ease with the idea that our present biosphere is the outcome of four billion years of Darwinian evolution. -- Martin Rees
An Internet meme is a hijacking of the original idea. Instead of mutating by random change and spreading by a form of Darwinian selection, Internet memes are altered deliberately by human creativity. There is no attempt at accuracy of copying, as with genes - and as with memes in their original version. -- Richard Dawkins
If the history of resistance to Darwinian thinking is a good measure, we can expect that long into the future, long after every triumph of human thought has been matched or surpassed by 'mere machines,' there will still be thinkers who insist that the human mind works in mysterious ways that no science can comprehend. -- Daniel Dennett
No wonder the creationists don't believe the darwinian account. -- Mark Pagel

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