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

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.

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

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

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...

During the youthful period of mankind’s spiritual evolution human fantasy created gods in man’s own image, who, by the operations of their will were supposed to determine, or at any rate to influence, the phenomenal...

Creativity sparks originality which then manifests itself into what we call evolution. To depreciate imagination is to depreciate life.

The following proposition seems to me in a high degree probable—namely, that any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or...

The secrets of evolution are death and time—the deaths of enormous numbers of lifeforms that were imperfectly adapted to the environment; and time for a long succession of small mutations.

However life started, once established, it persisted for over 3.5 billion years and evolved from microbial slime to the sophistication of human civilization.

A physicist that I know commented that many other scientific disciplines, such as geology, anthropology, astronomy, are also challenged by biblical fundamentalism, but their people seem to be able to get on with their work...

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...

Saying of the ProphetHumilityHumility and courtesy are themselves a part of piety.

There is a saying that, according to what a person’s mentality is, even an angel may seem to him to have a devil’s face.

Inner Knowledge — You want to become wise in one lesson: First become a real human being.

The automatism of man is overcome, in the words of Dhun’Nun, by aiming for ‘being as you were, where you were, before you were’.

Evolution is a tinkerer.

Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose objections are based not on reasoning but on doctrinaire adherence to religious principles.

The author has found that the second law [of thermodynamics] tends to increase conviction that there is a Creator.

Soon we shall discover that the temple of all humanity is nothing less that the Temple of the Living God!” ~ Chapter One, “The Awakening” ~ Discovering the Bliss of your True Divine Reality

A four-letter alphabet called DNA.

The most powerful force ever known on this planet is human cooperation — a force for construction and destruction.

A red dragonfly hovers above a backwater of the stream, its wings moving so fast that the eye sees not wings in movement but a probability distribution of where the wings might be, like electron...

…and specimens like this confirmed there had been some kind of divine rule in the universe because no natural selection process was up to the task of creating something like him. This was some god’s,...

A wonderful area for speculative academic work is the unknowable. These days religious subjects are in disfavor, but there are still plenty of good topics. The nature of consciousness, the workings of the brain, the...

The male frog, in mating season,” said Crake, “makes as much noise as it can. The females are attracted to the male frog with the biggest, deepest voice because it suggests a more powerful frog,...

In the abstract, it might be tempting to imagine that irreducible complexity simply requires multiple simultaneous mutations – that evolution might be far chancier than we thought, but still possible. Such an appeal to brute...

chance-of-the-gaps fallacy.” Chance, like God, can become a stop-gap for ignorance.

common sense” told them was impossible.

If the second dinosaur to the left of the tall cycad tree had not happened to sneeze and thereby fail to catch the tiny, shrew-like ancestor of all the mammals, we should none of us...

When hip-hop was born she had no commercial home, and was an invention of beautiful creativity. Born from a beautiful struggle, today she is mostly a ‘ratchet’ bitch spitting nonsense from her pimp’s mansion.

If evolutionism were to be rejected, the whole structure upon which the modern world is based would collapse and one would have to accept the incredible wisdom of the Creator in the creation of the...

[Responding to the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce’s question whether he traced his descent from an ape on his mother’s or his father’s side]A man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape...

When we understand that Peace is a state of mind we understand true Peace.

Life is unlikely to end with humans, even if we burn in a nuclear holocaust. The relentless wheel of evolution will pick up from where we leave off and roll to it’s predestined goal. If...

Humans have evolved to their relatively high state by retaining the immature characteristics of their ancestors. Humans are the most advanced of mammals – although a case could be made for the dolphins – because...

The geologic column is a bunch of balarky.

The playwright Edward Albee has characterized [the suddenness of the appearance of fruits and flowers in evolutionary history] as ‘that heartbreaking second when it all got together: the sugars and the acids and the ultraviolets,...

The expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient.

…a man is not in any difficulty in making a reply according to his faith … to those who try to defame our Holy Scripture. … when they produce from any of their books a...

I never yet heard of a useless thing that was not ground out ofexistence by evolution sooner or later. Did you? And pain gets needless.

Today we are fighting Communism. Okay. If I’d been alive fifty years ago, the brand of Conservatism we have today would have been damn near called Communism and we should have been told to go...

However, I don’t understand why people insist on pitting the concepts of evolution and creation against each other. Why can’t they see that spiritualism and science are one? That bodies evolve and souls evolve and...

[Darwin] gave an answer to the tremendous question that so deeply concerns…What is Man? [He] answered this question to the effect that man is a natural product of the universe;…man is an animal, a vertebrate,...

Progress comes through capacity to learn, and is irresistible.