The Christians who engaged in infamous persecutions and shameful inquisitions were not evil men but misguided men. The churchmen who felt they had an edict from God to withstand the progress of science, whether in...

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]

In consequence of Darwin’s reformed Theory of Descent, we are now in a position to establish scientifically the groundwork of a non-miraculous history of the development of the human race. … If any person feels...

A century ago, people laughed at the notion that we were descended from monkeys. Today, the individuals most offended by that claim are the monkeys.

Stephen Hawking said that his quest is simply “trying to understand the mind of God”.

Evolution, thus, is merely contingent on certain processes articulated by Darwin: variation and selection. No longer is a fixed object transformed, as in transformational evolution, but an entirely new start is, so to speak, made...

Readers of Darwin’s life, for instance, and particularly of the published correspondence of Darwin, are henceforth naturalists in the making. Ever afterwards they are Darwins on a small scale, seeing animals and plants in an...

That natural selection can produce changes within a type is disputed by no one, not even the staunchest creationist. But that it can transform one species into another — that, in fact, has never been...

This survival of the fittest implies multiplication of the fittest.{The phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ was not originated by Charles Darwin, though he discussed Spencer’s ‘excellent expression’ in a letter to Alfred Russel Wallace (Jul...

Problems in science are sometimes made easier by adding complications.

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]

[Religious belief is] outmoded and ridiculous. [Belief in gods was a] worn out but once useful crutch in mankind’s journey towards truth. We consider the time has come for that crutch to be abandoned.It is...

These mysteries about how we evolved should not distract us from the indisputable fact that we did evolve.

This new consensus seemed so compelling that Ernst Mayr, the dean of modern Darwinians, opened the ashcan of history for a deposit of Geoffrey’s ideas about anatomical unity.

This survival of the fittest which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr. Darwin has called ‘natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.

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.

For these two years I have been gravitating towards your doctrines, and since the publication of your primula paper with accelerated velocity. By about this time next year I expect to have shot past you,...

You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being. Aristotle was an encyclopedic polymath, an all time intellect. Yet not only can you know more than him...

The fundamental core of contemporary Darwinism, the theory of DNA-based reproduction and evolution, is now beyond dispute among scientists. It demonstrates its power every day, contributing crucially to the explanation of planet-sized facts of geology...

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.

In Paley’s famous illustration, the adaptation of all the parts of the watch to the function, or purpose, of showing the time, is held to be evidence that the watch was specially contrived to that...

In science’s pecking order, evolutionary biology lurks somewhere near the bottom, far closer to phrenology than to physics. For evolutionary biology is a historical science, laden with history’s inevitable imponderables. We evolutionary biologists cannot generate...

All disciplines of science are built on the causality of the relationships governing related events. Yet the theory of evolution is built upon the idea of accidental changes that resulted in complex living systems. I...

Do you remember what Darwin says about music? He claims that the power of producing and appreciating it existed among the human race long before the power of speech was arrived at. Perhaps that is...

Very few, even among those who have taken the keenest interest in the progress of the revolution in natural knowledge set afoot by the publication of the ‘Origin of Species’; and who have watched, not...

Adam is fading out. It is on account of Darwin and that crowd. I can see that he is not going to last much longer. There’s a plenty of signs. He is getting belittled to...

The existence of consciousness is both one of the most familiar and one of the most astounding things about the world. No conception of the natural order that does not reveal it as something to...

What Galileo and Newton were to the seventeenth century, Darwin was to the nineteenth.

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.

I am absolutely convinced of the lack of true scientific evidence in favour of Darwinian dogma. Nobody in the biological sciences, medicine included, needs Darwinism at all. Darwinism is certainly needed, however, in order to...

That which struck the present writer most forcibly on his first perusal of the ‘Origin of Species’ was the conviction that Teleology, as commonly understood, had received its deathblow at Mr. Darwin’s hands. For the...

Truth be told, evolution hasn’t yielded many practical or commercial benefits. Yes, bacteria evolve drug resistance, and yes, we must take countermeasures, but beyond that there is not much to say. Evolution cannot help us...

If Charles Darwin reappeared today, he might be surprised to learn that humans are descended from viruses as well as from apes.

We have really, that I know of, no philosophical basis for high and low. Moreover, the vegetable kingdom does not culminate, as the animal kingdom does. It is not a kingdom, but a common-wealth; a...

The funny thing is if in England, you ask a man in the street who the greatest living Darwinian is, he will say Richard Dawkins. And indeed, Dawkins has done a marvelous job of popularizing...

lower animals” (so-called,) and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the result profoundly humiliating to me. For it obliges me to renounce my allegiance to the Darwinian theory of the...

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...

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...