Yes, sir, but the Librarian likes bananas, sir.””Very nourishin’ fruit, Mr Stibbons.””Yes, sir. Although, funnily enough it’s not actually a fruit, sir.””Really?””Yes, sir. Botanically, it’s a type of fish, sir. According to my theory it’s...

As his body became more and more defenseless, so his means of offense became steadily more frightful.

Natural selection is not the wind which propels the vessel, but the rudder which, by friction, now on this side and now on that, shapes the course.

When we no longer look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship, as at something wholly beyond his comprehension; when we regard every production of nature as one which has had...

Every creature is a co-creator

Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution? I suspect that it does; I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick extinction. Where there is no joy there can be...

When one ponders on the tremendous journey of evolution over the past three billion years or so, the prodigious wealth of structures it has engendered, and the extraordinarily effective teleonomic performances of living beings from...

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...

I don’t think that evolution is supremely important because it is my specialty; it is my specialty because I think it is supremely important. [In: Edward J. Larson (2004) Evolution, Modern Library. p. 250]

HE is a Master who may teach without it being totally labelled teaching; HE is a student who can learn without being obsessed by learning.

What you have to learn is how to find the unworldly in everything.

Laziness – The laziness of adolescence is a rehearsal for the incapacity of old age.

Revolution like evolution does not come about overnight. Evolution delivers on its promises but revolution rarely delivers on what was promised.

While most science moves in a sort of curve, being constantly corrected by new evidence, this science flies off into space in a straight line uncorrected by anything. But the habit of forming conclusions, as...

So long as we are driven by the need to make up for our needs; by the restless sense that we are not yet fully assured of our place in the world and our hold...

If the entire course of evolution were compressed into a single year, the earliest bacteria would appear at the end of March, but we wouldn’t see the first human ancestors until 6 a.m. on December...

An irrefutable proof that such single-celled primaeval animals really existed as the direct ancestors of Man, is furnished according to the fundamental law of biogeny by the fact that the human egg is nothing more...

Morality comes from religion? There are no Baptist babies or Catholic babies or Muslim babies. Religion is imposed on children by adults and society, and morality is an evolutionary adaptation. Period.

The problem Creationists identify is with the word ‘theory’, not with the case for evolution

I had written the sentence, ‘You mustn’t think that the evolution that gave rise to us was the only evolutionary possibility on this planet. . . . that cultural developments could be shaped through the...

When you talk with people, one of the arguments they’ll throw back at you is that the climate has always changed, and that is absolutely right. It’s the rate of change that is the problem...

Evolution is more about the condition of the heart of a man who does not want to acknowledge God than it is about the facts.

Johnson is a radical skeptic, insisting, in the best Socratic tradition, that everything be put on the table for examination. By contrast, most skeptics opposed to him are selective skeptics, applying their skepticism to the...

Asexual organisms reproduce by fission (splitting in half).

Maybe scientists are fundamentalist when it comes to defining in some abstract way what is meant by ‘truth’. But so is everybody else. I am no more fundamentalist when I say evolution is true than...

For three million years we were hunter-gatherers, and it was through the evolutionary pressures of that way of life that a brain so adaptable and so creative eventually emerged. Today we stand with the brains...

Q: But what do you think that the Bible, itself, says? Don’t you know how it was arrived at?A: I never made a calculationQ: What do you think?A: I do not think about things I...

As long as museums and universities send out expeditions to bring to light new forms of living and extinct animals and new data illustrating the interrelations of organisms and their environments, as long as anatomists...

There can be no doubt that the existing Fauna and Flora is but the last term of a long series of equally numerous contemporary species, which have succeeded one another, by the slow and gradual...

When you deeply love someone from that space that is beyond attachment to certain projections or desires, when you love someone just deeply, totally, completely, without any games that the mind or emotions play, then...

It seems to me that the Russian prestige is declining and that America holds in its hands the immediate future of the world: as long as America knows how to develop the sense of the...

The conditions necessary for devastating epidemics or pandemics just didn’t exist until the agricultural revolution. The claim that modern medicine and sanitation save us from infectious diseases that ravaged pre-agricultural people (something we hear often)...

We are only fully human when we act as if the life beyond us matters.

A grand and almost untrodden field of inquiry will be opened, on the causes and laws of variation, on correlation of growth, on the effects of use and disuse, on the direct actions of external...

I take leave to contradict those who say that salvation is an evolution! All that ever can be evolved out of the sinful heart of man is sin-and nothing else! Salvation is the free gift...

[Intelligent design advocates were ebullient Tuesday.] It’s very significant for the students of Kansas, … Instead of just the evidence that supports evolution, they’re going to see all sides.

Not that chance dominated events in the early Solar System, for scientific determinism was also functioning. But chance is an essential factor in all evolutionary events, and the birth and development of our planetary system...

Disaster is a natural part of my evolution toward tragedy and dissolution.

In the realm of Greater Understanding, the workshop is dismantled after the work is finished.

To copy a virtue in another is more copying than it is virtue. Try to learn what that virtue is based upon.

it was being written in the East that ‘Sufism was formerly a reality without a name: now it is a name without a reality’.

It is just part of the evolving market. We are just doing it a little less subtly than Disney does it, and it is happening all at once. It’s just what happens. It’s called evolution....

Natural selection is a blind and undirected consequence of the interaction between variation and the environment. Natural selection exists only in the continuous present of the natural world: it has no memory of its previous...

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

Out of the choked Devonian waters emerged sight and sound and the music that rolls invisible through the composer’s brain. They are there still in the ooze along the tideline, though no one notices. The...

When you gaze out on a quiet, peaceful meadow, next to a still pond, under a motionless blue sky, you wonder how the noisy, busy cacophony of life could have arisen from such silent, motionless...

Man wants to see nature and evolution as separate from human activities. There is a natural world, and there is man. But man also belongs to the natural world. If he is a ferocious predator,...

The point I want to make about methanogens is that they were the losers in the race through a bottleneck, yet nonetheless survived in niche environments. Similarly, on a larger scale, it is rare for...

All social animals, including people, live under constant pressure from two competing interests: protecting themselves from others and aligning themselves with others. When these two interests are balanced, the result is dynamic social homeostasis.

All of today’s DNA, strung through all the cells of the earth, is simply an extension and elaboration of [the] first molecule.