There are many examples where species share common plastic traits. What appears to be convergence may just be the plastic response of the organism to its environment. Examples include the following: Limbs that protrude from...

Don’t pour a lifetime of effort into a seasonal relationship. Not everyone from the pilot belongs in the finale.

A Large-Scale Revolution can not happen without a higher-awareness to seek Personal Growth on an individual level.

I furnished the body that was needed to sit in the defendant’s chair.[Explaining his role in the Scopes Monkey Trial.]

About 4,400 years ago 8 people stepped off Noah’s ark. According to the United Nations Population Growth Statistics, the world’s population grows at about .47% per year. That is the growth rate for all civilizations...

And to think of this great country in danger of being dominated by people ignorant enough to take a few ancient Babylonian legends as the canons of modern culture. Our scientific men are paying for...

New mutations don’t create new species; they create offspring that are impaired.

Conformity to the present is invisibility to the future.

The evolution of animal behavior does constitute a learning process, but it is learning by the species, not by the individual, and the fruits of this learning process are encoded in DNA.

We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.

Nature’s stern discipline enjoins mutual help at least as often as warfare. The fittest may also be the gentlest.

Objectivity cannot be equated with mental blankness; rather, objectivity resides in recognizing your preferences and then subjecting them to especially harsh scrutiny — and also in a willingness to revise or abandon your theories when...

The universe is not for man alone, but is a theater of evolution for all living beings. Live and let live is its guiding principle. ‘Ahimsa Paramo Dharmah’ – Non-injury is the highest religion.

Evolution works on the just-good-enough principle. So we want to learn how to mesh advantageous principles from biological systems with the best human engineering to actually build things that are better than nature.

Your job is to get off your self righteous butt and start reaching out to the difficult people because my ministry wasn’t about a bunch of nice people getting together once a week to sing...

The great cognitive shift is an expansion of consciousness from the perspectival form contained in the lives of particular creatures to an objective, world-encompassing form that exists both individually and intersubjectively. It was originally a...

Evolve your understanding of success from the outer realm of control, materialism, and ego, to the inner realm of surrender, spirituality, and compassion.

I think the discomfort that some people feel in going to the monkey cages at the zoo is a warning sign.

Before you can ask ‘Is Darwinian theory correct or not?’, You have to ask the preliminary question ‘Is it clear enough so that it could be correct?’. That’s a very different question. One of my...

Blind metaphysical necessity, which is certainly the same always and every where, could produce no variety of things. All that diversity of natural things which we find suited to different times and places could arise...

evolution is not progress, that there is no ‘goal’ or direction to evolution. Evolution is change. Evolution ‘succeeds’ if that change best adapts some leaf or branch of its tree of life to conditions of...

Opportunity’s precious, and time is a sword.

A Sufi is alive to the value of time, and is given, every moment, to what that moment demands.

You can learn more in half an hour’s direct contact with a source of knowledge (no matter the apparent reason for the contact or the subject of the transaction) than you can in years of...

Make mankind your dwelling place.

The fittest person survives! The fighting man succeeds! He who Fights to Fit, will Survive to Succeed!

Do you see the slightest evidence anywhere in the universe that creation came to an end with the birth of man? Do you see the slightest evidence anywhere out there that man was the climax...

Great Outdoors”places me in a different tonal mood, filledup with hope and passion, not resentful,suppressed relics of anger unresolvedDid you listen to the winds?What did you hear?Did you listen to the trees?What knowledge did they...

The great age of the earth will appear greater to man when he understands the origin of living organisms and the reasons for the gradual development and improvement of their organization. This antiquity will appear...

It’s called evolution. You must know that. Yes, we are.’She looked up from her book.’I would hope, though,’ she went on, ‘that we also have some rather more beautiful ancestors. Don’t you?’ –Mina

In what appears to have been an unplanned quip, Wilberforce asked Huxley if he thought he was descended from an ape on his father’s or mother’s side. Huxley retorted that he would rather have simian...

My firm conviction is that if wide-spread Eugenic reforms are not adopted during the next hundred years or so, our Western Civilization is inevitably destined to such a slow and gradual decay as that which...

The debate that has been conducted in terms of “creation versus evolution” has gotten caught up with all kinds of other debates, and this has provided a singularly unhelpful backdrop to the would-be serious discussion...

Evolution provides a scientific foundation for the core values shared by most Christians and conservatives, and by accepting–and embracing–the theory of evolution, Christians and conservatives strengthen their religion, their politics, and science itself. The conflict...

But why live in these environments at all? What possessed fish to get out of the water or live in the margins? Think of this: virtually every fish swimming in these 375-million-year-old streams was a...

One thing: you have to walk, and create the way by your walking; you will not find a ready-made path. It is not so cheap, to reach to the ultimate realization of truth. You will...

It will be noticed that the fundamental theorem proved above bears some remarkable resemblances to the second law of thermodynamics. Both are properties of populations, or aggregates, true irrespective of the nature of the units...

The offspring cannot rely on its parents for disinterested guidance. One expects the offspring to be preprogrammed to resist some parental manipulation while being open to other forms. When the parent imposes an arbitrary system...

The essential quality that an entity needs, if it is to become an effective gene vehicle, is this. It must have an impartial exit channel into the future, for all the genes inside it. This...

Time is an illusion, only the keepers of the illusion are real, and the reality they have spun, keeps us, until we set upon the path of the dream.

Change is inevitable. Evolution, however, is optional.

Any ape can reach for a banana, but only humans can reach for the stars.

The Divine has created this moment in time. It is a very powerful moment, where there is only one way and that way is that you completely let go. Completely let go of what is...

I don’t need to go to heaven or hell. I have been both places and always wanted more. I will settle for somewhere in between, so eternity never becomes dull and every miracle is something...

When humans began cultivating the land, they thought that the extra work this required will pay off. ‘Yes, we will have to work harder. But the harvest will be so bountiful! We won’t have to...

My hand-stitched wings itchto take flightto test the winds of changethat inevitably blow at the end of a cycle.

You are the observer who watches your emotions as they push, pull and stretch you.

To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been...

Evolution has taught them that pointless harm will ultimately harm themselves.

Frank White, who literally wrote the book on the overview effect, is also part of the Overview Institute. And he thinks of space travel largely as Mitchell does—an evolutionary step. “If fish could think at...