When man comes to the realization that he is not the “favorite” of God; that he was not specially created, that the universe was not made for his benefit, and that he is subject to...

To understand Darwin’s work, you have to distinguish between his theory of descent and his theory of natural selection. THe full name of the first is the theory of descent with modification. Some call it...

You will evolve past certain people. Let yourself.

The fact that mammalian crying serves as a cue for maternal support, rather than as a dinner bell, is a major evolutionary difference.

[There’s a] point where you have to leave the dough alone. It’s silly to anthropomorphize bread, but I love the fact that it needs to sit quietly, to retreat from touch and noise and drama,...

In thinking about these questions I have been stimulated by criticisms of the prevailing scientific world picture… by the defenders of intelligent design. Even though writers like Michael Behe and Stephen C. Meyer are motivated...

What happens to the world when science stops evolving?

The alternative to thinking in evolutionary terms is not to think at all.

As many critics of religion have pointed out, the notion of a creator poses an immediate problem of an infinite regress. If God created the universe, what created God? To say that God, by definition,...

Wars are an outdated way to try to solve conflicts, which is unacceptable in the 21st century. Instead of trying to conquer yourself, wars are an unconscious way to try to conquer life. Wars are...

It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).

I mean to say, we all sprang from humble origins. Goodness gracious, who would have thought that a species of monkey would take over the kingdom of the world. … I cannot help but feel...

Obsolescence is a fate devoutly to be wished, lest science stagnate and die.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, it was already clear that, chemically speaking, you and I are not much different from cans of soup. And yet we can do many complex and even fun...

Long before there were effective treatments, physicians dispensed prognoses, hope, and, above all, meaning. When something terrible happens-and serious disease is always terrible-people want to know why. In a pantheistic world, the explanation was simple-one...

Sometimes painfully lost people can teach us lessons that we didn’t think we needed to know, or be reminded of—the more history changes, the more it stays the same.

It is the destiny of things real to destroy those that are artifice.

Although random mutations influenced the course of evolution, their influence was mainly by loss, alteration, and refinement… Never, however, did that one mutation make a wing, a fruit, a woody stem, or a claw appear....

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.

Evolve solutions; when you find a good one, don’t stop.

Pain and darkness have been our lot since the Fall of Man. But there must be some hope that we can rise to a higher level … that consciousness can evolve to a plane more...

He cursed himself for having assumed the weather would be sunny. Perhaps it was the result of evolution, he thought–some adaptive gene that allowed the English to go on making blithe outdoor plans in the...

People who cannot trust are themselves not trustworthy, and therefore cannot be entrusted with important things.

If you cannot laugh frequently and genuinely, you have no soul.

Sufi secrets are perceived, not understood by words.

Is this Tree of Life a God one could worship? Pray to? Fear? Probably not. But it did make the ivy twine and the sky so blue, so perhaps the song I love tells a...

If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools,...

. . . [A] creationist spy named Luther Sunderland snuck into a closed scientific meeting of the Systematics Discussion Group at the American Museum in 1981 with a hidden tape recorder. . . . My...

Perhaps he knew, there in the grass by the waters, that he had before him an immense journey.

God is not an alternative to science as an explanation, he is not to be understood merely as a God of the gaps, he is the ground of all explanation: it is his existence which...

Natural science in England, as Darwin already knew to his cost, was still the purview of Christian scholars. But here was a question that Darwin found compelling: if God had created all the creatures of...

A hydrogen atom in a cell at the end of my nose was once part of an elephant’s trunk. A carbon atom in my cardiac muscle was once in the tail of a dinosaur.

I wanted to think of what could not be thought except in intersections; I wanted to satiate my fiendishness in a neutering gnosis. I wanted to see the first chimp paint it’s own likeness in...

More about the selection theory: Jerne meant that the Socratic idea of learning was a fitting analogy for ‘the logical basis of the selective theories of antibody formation’: Can the truth (the capability to synthesize...

It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way,...

…But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much...

I am absolutely convinced of the lack of true scientific evidence in favour of Darwinian dogma. Nobody in the biological sciences, medicine included, needs Darwinism at all. Darwinism is certainly needed, however, in order to...

The dodo itself stands as the best emblem of this general truth – that insular evolution often involves transforming an adventurous, high-flying ancestor species into a grounded descendant, no longer capable of going anywhere but...

In a designed economy there would be no trees, or certainly no very tall trees: no forests, no canopy. Trees are a waste. Trees are extravagant. Tree trunks are standing monuments to futile competition –...

Is it a weakness not being able to hate? Or is it preparation for what is inevitable, the ability only to love.

Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability.

I recently asked more than seventy eminent researchers if they would have done I their work differently if they had thought Darwin’s theory was wrong. The responses were all the same: no. I also examined...

Those who hold to the Christian faith see law as an ultimate order of the universe. It is the invariable factor in a variable world, the unchanging order in a changing universe. Law for the...

One thing that really appeals to me is this idea of music being a living thing that has an evolution that, in a way, enables the artist to sell a process rather than a piece...

Probably went swimming and got eaten by a pineapple.

Everything good in New York used to be something awful, I guess.””And everything awful used to be something good.