It’s strange how what drives us may abandon us midstream, how what tickles our ears with lies one moment may tell us truths that knock us on our emotional ass the next. After all, it...

For those scientists who take it seriously, Darwinian evolution has functioned more as a philosophical belief system than as a testable scientific hypothesis. This quasi-religious function of the theory is, I think, what lies behind...

They knew how to live with nature and get along with nature. They didn’t try too hard to be all men and no animal. That’s the mistake we made when Darwin showed up. We embraced...

There is a massive, irreconcilable conflict between science and religion. Religion was humanity’s original cosmology, biology and anthropology. It provided explanations for the origin of the world, life and humans. Science now gives us increasingly...

I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially to the extent to which it has been applied, will be one of the greatest jokes in the history books of the future. Posterity will...

The law of evolution is that the strongest survives!’ ‘Yes, and the strongest, in the existence of any social species, are those who are most social. In human terms, most ethical…There is no strength to...

Throughout 150 years of the science of bacteriology, there is no evidence that one species of bacteria has changed into another… Since there is no evidence for species changes between the simplest forms of unicellular...

Cats catch mice, small birds and the like, very well. Teleology tells us that they do so because they were expressly constructed for so doing—that they are perfect mousing apparatuses, so perfect and so delicately...

Evolution is the law of policies: Darwin said it, Socrates endorsed it, Cuvier proved it and established it for all time in his paper on ‘The Survival of the Fittest.’ These are illustrious names, this...

So this is where all the vapid talk about the ‘soul’ of the universe is actually headed. Once the hard-won principles of reason and science have been discredited, the world will not pass into the...

Elgin himself looked ten years younger, now that he’d cast the die, but I thought exuberance had got the better of him when he strode into the saloon later, threw The Origin of Species on...

…We lost our faith and went around wondering what life was for. If art was no more than a frustrated out-flinging of desire, if religion was no more than self-delusion, what good was life? Faith...

Medals are great encouragement to young men and lead them to feel their work is of value, I remember how keenly I felt this when in the 1890s. I received the Darwin Medal and the...

To understand Darwin’s work, you have to distinguish between his theory of descent and his theory of natural selection. THe full name of the first is the theory of descent with modification. Some call it...

Genetics might be adequate for explaining microevolution, but microevolutionary changes in gene frequency were not seen as able to turn a reptile into a mammal or to convert a fish into an amphibian. Microevolution looks...

In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light...

Much of the geographical work of the past hundred years… has either explicitly or implicitly taken its inspiration from biology, and in particular Darwin. Many of the original Darwinians, such as Hooker, Wallace, Huxley, Bates,...

Darwin abolished special creations, contributed the Origin of Species and hitched all life together in one unbroken procession.

The idea that one can go to the fossil record and expect to empirically recover an ancestor-descendant sequence, be it of species, genera, families, or whatever, has been, and continues to be, a pernicious illusion.

Quite recently the human descent theory has been stigmatized as the ‘gorilla theory of human ancestry.’ All this despite the fact that Darwin himself, in the days when not a single bit of evidence regarding...

In Darwin’s time no serious attempt had been made to examine the manifestations of variability. A vast assemblage of miscellaneous facts could formerly be adduced as seemingly comparable illustrations of the phenomenon “Variation.” Time has...

According to Teleology, each organism is like a rifle bullet fired straight at a mark; according to Darwin, organisms are like grapeshot of which one hits something and the rest fall wide.For the teleologist an...

Natural science in England, as Darwin already knew to his cost, was still the purview of Christian scholars. But here was a question that Darwin found compelling: if God had created all the creatures of...

I recently asked more than seventy eminent researchers if they would have done I their work differently if they had thought Darwin’s theory was wrong. The responses were all the same: no. I also examined...

I swear in the name of almighty God, my loyalty to the Fuhrer?” How come that on the belt buckle of every Nazi soldier it says Gott mit uns, God on our side? How come...

Among the things most characteristic of organisms–most distinctive of living as opposed to inorganic systems–is a sort of directedness. Their structures and activities have an adaptedness, an evident and vital usefulness to the organism. Darwin’s...

For him the tragedy of Homo sapiens is that the least fit to survive breed the most.

The phrase ‘the fossil record’ sounds impressive and authoritative. As used by some persons it becomes, as intended, intimidating, taking on the aura of esoteric truth as expounded by an elite class of specialists. But...

No fossil is buried with its birth certificate. That, and the scarcity of fossils, means that it is effectively impossible to link fossils into chains of cause and effect in any valid way… To take...

It was in the attempt to ascertain the interrelationships between species that experiments n genetics were first made. The words “evolution” and “origin of species” are now so intimately associated with the name of Darwin...

The publication of the Darwin and Wallace papers in 1858, and still more that of the ‘Origin’ in 1859, had the effect upon them of the flash of light, which to a man who has...

Thomas Wollaston, in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History, complained that Darwin did no seem to know what a species actually was. The British Quarterly, deliberately sitting up trouble, speculated that a time might...

One of the truly bizarre things about our current cultural situation is that the leading figures of the scientific establishment seem genuinely amazed that the citizens do not accept finch-beak variation as proof of the...

To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been...

Mere lack of evidence, of course, is no reason to denounce a theory. Look at intelligent design. The fact that it is bollocks hasn’t stopped a good many people from believing in it. Darwinism itself...

Darwinism by itself did not produce the Holocaust, but without Darwinism… neither Hitler nor his Nazi followers would have had the necessary scientific underpinnings to convince themselves and their collaborators that one of the worlds...

Why should I have to hide the fact that I don’t believe there’s a supreme being? There’s no proof of it. There’s no harm in saying you’re an atheist. It doesn’t mean you treat people...

Darwinism is dynamic. It is about change, not stasis; about process, not pattern; about tales, not tableaux; about becoming, not being.

Of the contributions made during the essayist period three call for notice: Weismann deserves mention for his useful work in asking for the proof that “acquired characters” or, to speak more precisely, parental experience can...

I published that theory [of speciational evolution] in a 1954 paper…and I clearly related it to paleontology. Darwin argued that the fossil record is very incomplete because some species fossilize better than others… I noted...

Who gave the decisive deathblow to the argument from design on the basis of biological complexity? Both philosophers and biologists are divided on this point (Oppy 1996; Dawkins 1986; Sober 2008). Some have claimed that...

The ideology and philosophy of neo-Darwinism which is sold by its adepts as a scientific theoretical foundation of biology seriously hampers the development of science and hides from students the field’s real problems.

As natural selection acts by competition, it adapts the inhabitants of each country only in relation to the degree of perfection of their associates; so that we need feel no surprise at the inhabitants of...

When in 1863 Thomas Huxley coined the phrase ‘Man’s Place in Nature,’ it was to name a short collection of his essays applying to man Darwin’s theory of evolution. The Origin of Species had been...

The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land, to...

It was badly received by the generation to which it was first addressed, and the outpouring of angry nonsense to which it gave rise is sad to think upon. But the present generation will probably...

Evolution on the large scale unfolds, like much of human history, as a succession of dynasties.

Living organisms were not independently created, but have descended and diversified over time from common ancestors. And thus, no other biological theory so elegantly explains this. Evolutionary theory has withstood the test of time—by way...

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.

Satan is behind the theory of evolution. Satan hates God and us. Satan is the father of all lies. So he wants nothing more than to make every human being alive believe lies about God,...