Ben Stein Quotes

My feeling is that Darwinism is only at best a partial solution, and an extremely dangerous partial solution. I would say, based on the little I know, Darwinism explains microevolution within species quite well. As to its broader consequence and implications, I don't think it explains individual species evolution at all well.

Darwinism is still very much alive, utterly dominating biology. Despite the fact that no one has ever been able to prove the creation of a single distinct species by Darwinist means, Darwinism dominates the academy and the media.

The Theory of Evolution has been proved true

The Theory of Evolution has had over a million chances to be wrong, but never has been.

This fundamental subject of Natural Selection will be treated at some length in the fourth chapter; and we shall then see how Natural Selection almost inevitably causes much Extinction of the less improved forms of life and induces what I have called Divergence of Character.

Every philosophical thinker hails it [The Origin of Species] as a veritable Whitworth gun in the armoury of liberalism.

Natural selection is a theory of local adaptation to changing environments. It proposes no perfecting principles, no guarantee of general improvement

Progressively thinking biologists, both in our country and abroad, saw in Darwinism the only right road to the further development of scientific biology.

I'm a Darwinian.

It has sometimes been said that the success of the Origin proved "that the subject was in the air," or "that men's minds were prepared for it." I do not think that this is strictly true, for I occasionally sounded not a few naturalists, and never happened to come across a single one who seemed to doubt about the permanence of species.

What! Did Sir W[alter] R[aleigh] believe that a male and female ounce (and, if so, why not two tigers and lions, etc?) would have produced, in a course of generations, a cat, or a cat a lion? This is Darwinizing with a vengeance.

I am an enthusiastic Darwinian, but I think Darwinism is too big a theory to be confined to the narrow context of the gene.

What Galileo and Newton were to the seventeenth century, Darwin was to the nineteenth.

Opponents say natural selection is not a theory supported by observation or experiment; that it is not based on fact; and that it cannot be proved. Well, no, you cannot prove the theory to people who won't believe in it any more than you can prove that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066. However, we know the battle happened then, just as we know the course of evolution on earth unambiguously shows that Darwin was right.

Evolution is the law of policies: Darwin said it, Socrates endorsed it, Cuvier proved it and established it for all time in his paper on The Survival of the Fittest. These are illustrious names, this is a mighty doctrine: nothing can ever remove it from its firm base, nothing dissolve it, but evolution.

I have come to the conclusion that Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical research programme.

Evolution is a laughing matter for anybody that's got a rational mind.

Darwin's theory of evolution is the last of the great nineteenth-century mystery religions. And as we speak it is now following Freudians and Marxism into the Nether regions, and I'm quite sure that Freud, Marx and Darwin are commiserating one with the other in the dark dungeon where discarded gods gather.

In fact, nothing in science as a whole has been more firmly established by interwoven factual information, or more illuminating than the universal occurrence of biological evolution. Further, few natural processes have been more convincingly explained than evolution by the theory of natural selection, or as it has been popularly called, Darwinism.

There's nothing nonsensical about saying that what would evolve if Darwinian selection has its head is something that you don't want to happen. And I could easily imagine trying to go against Darwinism.

Throughout his last half-dozen books, for example, Arthur Koestler has been conducting a campaign against his own misunderstanding of Darwinism. He hopes to find some ordering force, constraining evolution to certain directions and overriding the influence of natural selection. [...] Darwinism is not the theory of capricious change that Koestler imagines. Random variation may be the raw material of change, but natural selection builds good design by rejecting most variants while accepting and accumulating the few that improve adaptation to local environments.

Even if not a single fossil has ever been found, the evidence from surviving animals would still overwhelmingly force the conclusion that Darwin was right.

People still don't get how astounding Darwinism is. People think what shocked everybody was that Charles Darwin seemed to be saying we had descended from apes.

Obviously it depends on how you define a word like "evolution," because of course we have been evolving - both biologically and culturally - in relation to the natural world for hundreds of thousands of years.

To think that humans evolved from lower species BUT the evolutionary process somehow came to a halt and we all arrived at the finish line simultaneously is to embrace a fiction possibly more implausible than Christianity.