A totally blind process can by definition lead to anything; it can even lead to vision itself.

It looks as if the offspring have eyes so that they can see well (bad, teleological, backward causation), but that’s an illusion. The offspring have eyes because their parents’ eyes did see well (good, ordinary,...

Indeed, not all attacks—especially the bitter and ridiculing kind leveled at Darwin—are offered in good faith, but for practical purposes it is good policy to assume that they are.

Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.

One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.

In 1867, George Campbell, Duke of Argyll, had published The Reign of Law, a book that Darwin found deeply annoying. A supporter of Richard Owen, Campbell argued that while evolution (or “Development”) might be observable...

Might one not say that in the chance combination of nature’s production, since only those endowed with certain relations of suitability could survive, it is no cause for wonder that this suitability is found in...

Even today a good many distinguished minds seem unable to accept or even to understand that from a source of noise natural selection alone and unaided could have drawn all the music of the biosphere....

What are the chances that we will one day discover that DNA has absolutely nothing to do with inheritance? They are effectively zero.

I am quite sure that our views on evolution would be very different had biologists studied genetics and natural selection before and not after most of them were convinced that evolution had occurred.

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

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...

Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection determined the evolution of cultures in the same manner as it did that of species.

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...

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...

{On to contributions to evolutionary biology of 18th century French scientist, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon}He was not an evolutionary biologist, yet he was the father of evolutionism. He was the first person to discuss...

Perhaps the most legitimately dispiriting thing about reciprocal altruism is that it is a misnomer. Whereas with kin selection the “goal” of our genes is to actually help another organism, with reciprocal altruism the goal...