Our research focuses on the oldest stars, and probes the earliest phases of the evolution of our home galaxy, the Milky Way. The unprecedented sample available with RAVE will allow me — and now, with...

Evil originates not in the absence of guilt; but in our effort to escape it.

We are here because over billions of years, countless variables fell into place, any of which could have taken another path. We are essentially a beautiful fluke, as are the millions of other species with...

It’s very, very dangerous to lose contact with living nature.

The platypus, as it turns out, derives its DNA from a menagerie of creatures. When its genome was fully decoded, it was found only to be 80% mammalian, and had genes found previously only in...

…I suspect everyone there can reason along the lines I described…It’s just that when it comes to evolution, and especially to the related realization that we are all pretty small bits of the universe, it...

The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.

Past and present religious atrocities have occured not because we are evil, but because it is a fact of nature that the human species is, biologically, only partly rational. Evolution has meant that our prefrontal...

My religious convictions and scientific views cannot at present be more specifically defined than as those of a believer in creative evolution. I desire that no public monument or work of art or inscription or...

As Ummon and the other Masters teach, it explains why the giraffe evolved a long neck but never why the other animals did not. It explains why humankind evolved to intelligence, but not why the...

Definitions from Mulla Do-PiazaDrugs: Source of the mystical experience of the ignorant.

Patience is the food of understanding.

There is no wisdom where there is no common sense: it cannot under those conditions find any expression.

You yourself are your own barrier – rise from within it.

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...

What I want is to live of that initial and primordial something that was what made some things reach the point of aspiring to be human.

Don’t blame me. That’s evolution. Evolution’s always hard. Hard and bleak. No such thing as happy evolution.

First LawIn every animal which has not passed the limit of its development, a more frequent and continuous use of any organ gradually strengthens, develops and enlarges that organ, and gives it a power proportional...

And I’ve been thinking: if the human race manages to destroy itself, as it often seems to want to do, or if some great disaster comes, as it did for the dinosaurs, then the birds...

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...

Of all the problems which will have to be faced in the future, in my opinion, the most difficult will be those concerning the treatment of the inferior races of mankind.

Extremely unlikely events occur every moment and it is not a priori unthinkable that the evolution of life should be due to mere chance than that a particular order in a pack of cards should...

Believers can have both religion and science as long as there is no attempt to make A non-A, to make reality unreal, to turn naturalism into supernaturalism. (125)

We were not designed rationally, but are products of a convoluted history.

The natural evolution now will be for the shelters to see the pace of patient influx slow, and that is now happening,

Svante Arrhenius, recipient of the Nobel Prize in chemistry (1903), was a declared atheist and the author of The Evolution of the Worlds and other works on cosmic physics.

To a good approximation, all species are insects.

What, after all, is so special about genes? The answer is that they are replicators. The laws of physics are supposed to be true all over the accessible universe. Are there any principles of biology...

To win or lose often depends on set parameters. Expand the bounds of what is possible, and you may come out the true winner, outside the confines of its defining.

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

Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.

Within each of us is a light, awake, encoded in the fibers of our existence. Divine ecstasy is the totality of this marvelous creation experienced in the hearts of humanity

I tell the story to you now, but in each telling the story itself changes a little, changes direction, and that in turn changes you and me. So be very careful not only in how...

The introduction of HD DVD is an exciting milestone in the evolution of Home Theater. Partnering with key retailers in major markets across America, this tour will help Toshiba deliver the product information our customers...

Evolutionary biology is imperialistic, overtaking entire fields of endeavor simply by attaching the prefix bio – or neuro — to their names: bioethics, no comics, even, God help us, neurotheology. Its logic is deployed against...

Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more difficult–at least I have found it so–than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind.

From Lankaster to Lorenz, scientists have gotten it wrong. Parasites are complex, highly adapted creatures that are at the heart of the story of life. If there hadn’t been such high walls dividing scientists who...

Existing political philosophies all developed before evolutionary game theory, so they do not take equilibrium selection into account. Socialism pretends that individuals are not selfish sexual competitors, so it ignores equilibria altogether. Conservatism pretends that...

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...

The starting point of Darwin’s theory of evolution is precisely the existence of those differences between individual members of a race or species which morphologists for the most part rightly neglect. The first condition necessary,...

Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind.

The Way of the Sufis cannot be understood by means of the intellect or by ordinary book learning.

Saying of the ProphetDeathDie before your death.

The secret of Sufism is that it has no secret at all’.

I’ve been in love for five hundred million years…

Black is a blind remembering, she thought. You listen for pack sounds, for the cries of those who hunted your ancestors in a past so ancient only your most primitive cells remember. The ears see....

If a single cell, under appropriate conditions, becomes a man in the space of a few years, there can surely be no difficulty in understanding how, under appropriate conditions, a cell may, in the course...

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...

it may only be able to measure it.

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...