I am not the moon orbiting around your planet; I am the sun that will burn through your frozen mind.

Every now and then a man’s mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.

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...

Life is chemistry, not biology.

For the first time in history we can track the evolution of a pandemic in real time. Influenza viruses are notorious for their rapid mutation and unpredictable behavior.

Life did not take over the world by combat, but by networking.

When asked what kind of grad student Lynn Marulis takes: ‘I never take a straight A student. A real scientist tends to be critical, and somewhere along the line, they had to rebel against their...

Possibly here in the Holocene, or just before ten or twenty thousand years ago, life hit a peak of diversity. Then we appeared. We are the great meteorite.

For all the accomplishments of molecular biology, we still can’t tell a live cat from a dead cat.

Life is a planetary level phenomenon and the Earth has been alive for at least 3000 million years. To me the human move to take responsibility for the living Earth is laughable—the rhetoric of the...

Evolution is no linear family tree, but change in the single multidimensional being that has grown to cover the entire surface of Earth.

This is where the whole ape-descended thing reveals its worth, I thought madly. Sucks to be you, quadruped. Opposable thumbs – don’t leave home without them.

Folks, it’s time to evolve. That’s why we’re troubled. You know why our institutions are failing us, the church, the state, everything’s failing? It’s because, um – they’re no longer relevant. We’re supposed to keep...

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...

Two chemicals called actin and myosin evolved eons ago to allow the muscles in insect wings to contract and relax. Thus, insects learned to fly. When one of those paired molecules are absent, wings will...

The Theory of Evolution has more holes in it than a dam made out of Swiss cheese.

God knew man would evolve. People think some of the Old Testament laws are absurd now because we live in a very different culture, a different time period. They had their problems and we have...

Einsteinian” relativity or of Planck’s quantum theory in relation to Newton’s discoveries. They take absolutely nothing away from the greatness of the learned Englishman. Thanks to Newton, physics was able to advance until it achieved...

Life is never static. Despite catastrophic tragedies, life has persisted in evolving new varieties of unimaginable forms. I find comfort in the narrative of evolutionary history.

It has truly been said that ‘Humility is not so much a virtue as a necessity, in order to learn.

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...

The evolution of the universe is both mirrored by and incumbent upon your own.

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...

Prosperity cannot be experienced by living detached from Nature. Everything else is only a gradation of materialistic, earthly ambitions. We came from the stars and there lies the path to our substantive evolution.

There will come a time,’ I said, ‘when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or...

Verbal arguments should always be suspect.

When things get bad enough, then something happens to correct the course. And it’s for that reason that I speak about evolution as an error-making and an error-correcting process. And if we can be ever...

We should not be too quick to dismiss our own [ocular] arrangement. As so often in biology, the situation is more complex…..we have the advantage that our own light-sensitive cells are embedded directly in their...

Evolution endowed us with intuition only for those aspects of physics that had survival value for our distant ancestors, such as the parabolic orbits of flying rocks (explaining our penchant for baseball). A cavewoman thinking...

As evolutionary time is measured, we have only just turned up and have hardly had time to catch breath, still marveling at our thumbs, still learning to use the brand-new gift of language. Being so...

The theory of phlogiston was an inversion of the true nature of combustion. Removing phlogiston was in reality adding oxygen, while adding phlogiston was actually removing oxygen. The theory was a total misrepresentation of reality....

It takes many sheep to satisfy one wolf.

Evolution is more about adaptivity than adaptability.

Recall the metaphor I used in chapter 4 relating the random movements of molecules in a gas to the random movements of evolutionary change. Molecules in a gas move randomly with no apparent sense of...

Things exist either because they have recently come into existence or because they have qualities that made them unlikely to be destroyed in the past.

Seen in the light of evolution, biology is, perhaps, intellectually the most satisfying and inspiring science. Without that light it becomes a pile of sundry facts — some of them interesting or curious but making...

Astronomy defined our home as a small planet tucked away in one corner of an average galaxy among million; biology took away our status as paragons created in the image of God; geology gave us...

Breaking up is a natural evolution when you try to figure out what you want in life. If you’re with an individual who isn’t moving in the same direction and at the same rate that...

Today, and let us celebrate this fact, We can eat the light of our beloved, warmed by compassion or cooled by intellectual feeling. And if we are surprised, and some of us disappointed, that the...

The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.

I believe the defenders of intelligent design deserve our gratitude for challenging a scientific world view that owes some of the passion displayed by its adherents precisely to the fact that it is thought to...

Are we not witnessing a strange tableau of survival whenever a bird alights on the head of a crocodile, bringing together the evolutionary offspring of Triassic and Jurassic?

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view...

Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.

It is a more rational belief that man may become a brute than that a brute may become a man; and it is an easier faith that plants and animals may dwindle down into an...

Till o’er the wreck, emerging from the storm, Immortal Nature lifts her changeful form: Mounts from her funeral pyre on wings of flame, And soars and shines, another and the same.

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...

Learn about hornets from those who have been stung by them.

The Sufi is one who does what others do – when it is necessary. He is also one who does what others cannot do – when it is indicated.

Show me a person who really knows what ‘good’ is, and I will show you that he almost never uses the word.