One-third to one-half of humanity are said to go to bed hungry every night. In the Old Stone Age the fraction must have been much smaller. This is the era of hunger unprecedented. Now, in...

We have won the time lottery of the last 4 billion years.

The story of evolution unfolds with increasing levels of abstraction.

Evolution is not a genetically controlled distortion of one adult form into another; it is a genetically controlled alteration in a developmental program.

The evolution of life, and the evolutionary origin of mankind, are scientifically established as firmly and completely as any historical event not witnessed by human observers. Any concession to anti-evolutionists, suggesting that there are scientific...

The idea of decimation as a lottery converts the new iconography of the Burgess Shale into a radical view about the pathways of life and the nature of history. … May our poor and improbable...

There are animals we haven’t stopped by. Don’t think they’re harmless. Life will defend itself no matter how small it is.

Turning and climbing, the double helix evolved to an operation which had always existed as a possibility for mankind, the eating of light. The appetite for light was ancient. Light had been eaten metaphorically in...

Do not conform to seek the seekers, but leave the leavers. Wisdom comes from facing what you do not yet understand.

The existence of consciousness is both one of the most familiar and one of the most astounding things about the world. No conception of the natural order that does not reveal it as something to...

We must throw out the old, fear-based thought-forms and evolve, and begin to live as higher beings of compassion.

For the first time, we found fossils that allow us to connect the first phase of human evolution and the second phase.

The fossil record implies trial and error, the inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with a Great Designer (though not a Designer of a more remote and indirect temperament.)

If it has been revealed to man that the Almighty made him out of the dust of the earth, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, it is in vain to tell a...

There was a time when skepticism was an act of rebellion. Since to a degree I both believe in evolution and have faith, I can only conclude that, as prophesied, to have faith will someday...

We think a lot of secrets about the formation and evolution of the solar system will be found there.

Man (and woman) has an infinite capacity for self-development. Equally, he has an infinite capacity for self-destruction. A human being may be clinically alive and yet, despite all appearances, spiritually dead.

None should say: ‘I can trust,’ or ‘I cannot trust’ until he is master of the option, of trusting or not trusting.

What I should have said is that he thinks that there is a conflict between evolutionary biology and theism. Dennett thinks that evolutionary theory shows that it is irrational to believe that God exists; he...

They have fixed our nutrition and arranged our life-span. More than this, and ahead of this, efforts will not be productive.

All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the...

Exactly. That’s what’s been happening here for the past ten thousand years: You’ve been doing what you damn well please with the world. And of course you mean to go right on doing what you...

In the beginning of the eighteenth century, De Maillet made the first serious attempt to apply the doctrine [of evolution] to the living world. In the latter part of it, Erasmus Darwin, Goethe, and Lamarck...

It is not the organs—that is, the character and form of the animal’s bodily parts—that have given rise to its habits and particular structures. It is the habits and manner of life and the conditions...

As our larynxes descended, we were able to make sounds with our mouths in new and far more expressive ways. Verbal language soon overtook physical gesturing as the primary means of communication for all human...

Humanity will never truly evolve until personal responsibility becomes the norm.

Dedicated to the memory of MY FATHER. For if I had not believed that he would have wished me to give such help as I could toward making his life’s work of service to mankind,...

What is Man? Man is a noisome bacillus whom Our Heavenly Father created because he was disappointed in the monkey.

How can we find spiritual meaning in a scientific worldview? Spirituality is a way of being in the world, a sense of one’s place in the cosmos, a relationship to that which extends beyond oneself....

Take the entire 4.5-billion-year history of the earth and scale it down to a single year, with January 1 being the origin of the earth and midnight on December 31 being the present. Until June,...

With me, illusions are bound to be shattered. I am here to shatter all illusions. Yes, it will irritate you, it will annoy you – that’s my way of functioning and working. I will sabotage...

What separates man from animal is not the things we build or the ideas we stand behind. Its our ability to kill from a distance that makes us different

I remember one incident which bears upon this part of the treatise. The gentleman who gave it to me had asked to see my tobacco-pipe; he examined it carefully, and when he came to the...

Dan Nilsson even remarks of compound eyes that ‘It is only a small exaggeration to say that evolution seems to be fighting a desperate battle to improve a basically disastrous design.

More and more obstacles seem to be other people’s issues that form in the way of a hand to block one, to take notice of them? Sometimes noticing ahead of time, and taking the time...

Certainly it’s a rare glimpse into the lives of the Secular Ancients. They don’t seem as bad as the Dominion histories make them out to be. Though clearly they were imperfect.””I don’t deny that they...

It is about her evolution as a woman coming to understand it. She’s not hiding her sexuality, she’s trying to define her sexuality.

The practice is simple. Whatever you’re doing, do that with total awareness.

Compassion is not something you have; it is something you share.

Many call this process ‘the destruction of nature.’ But it’s not really destruction, it’s change. Nature cannot be destroyed.

Change blows through the branches of our existence. It fortifies the roots on which we stand, infuses crimson experience with autumn hues, dismantles Winter’s brittle leaves, and ushers Spring into our fertile environments. Seeds of...

The art of surrender is the art of getting out of the way of your own growth.

But just in proportion as this process of extermination has acted on an enormous scale, so must the number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed, be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological...

A lot of people have shifted their views, … People do shift, so there may be an evolution of his thinking.

Of the many species that have existed on earth–estimates run as high as fifty billion–more than ninety-nine per cent have disappeared. In the light of this, it is sometimes joked that all of life today...

A curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it.

This survival of the fittest which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr. Darwin has called ‘natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.

Species evolve exactly as if they were adapting as best they could to a changing world, and not at all as if they were moving toward a set goal.

Two forces pervade human life, the Gita says: the upward thrust of evolution and the downward pull of our evolutionary past.

When in 1863 Thomas Huxley coined the phrase ‘Man’s Place in Nature,’ it was to name a short collection of his essays applying to man Darwin’s theory of evolution. The Origin of Species had been...