Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes

Pretty much every plant and animal alive today is the result of eons of natural cross-breeding.

After my return to England it appeared to me that by following the example of Lyell in Geology, and by collecting all facts which bore in any way on the variation of animals and plants under domestication and nature, some light might perhaps be thrown on the whole subject.

Most species do their own evolving, making it up as they go along, which is the way Nature intended.

The secrets of evolution are death and time-the deaths of enormous numbers of lifeforms that were imperfectly adapted to the environment; and time for a long succession of small mutations.

To many people, 'biodiversity' is almost synonymous with the word 'nature,' and 'nature' brings to mind steamy forests and the big creatures that dwell there. Fair enough. But biodiversity is much more than that, for it encompasses not only the diversity of species, but also the diversity within species.

First, Darwinian theory tells us how a certain amount of diversity in life forms can develop once we have various types of complex living organisms already in existence.

Natural selection eliminates and maybe maintains, but it doesn't create.

But naturalists are now beginning to look beyond this, and to see that there must be some other principle regulating the infinitely varied forms of animal life.

We are the product of 4.5 billion years of fortuitous, slow biological evolution. There is no reason to think that the evolutionary process has stopped. Man is a transitional animal. He is not the climax of creation.

The elementary particles which form the embryo are each drawn from the corresponding structure in the parent, and conserve a sort of remembrance of their previous form, so that in the offspring they will reflect and reproduce a resemblance to the parents ... We can thus readily explain how new species are formed... by supposing that the elementary particles may not always retain the order which they present in the parents, but may fortuitously produce differences, which, multiplying and accumulating, have resulted in the infinite variety of species which we see at the present time.

The tree of life was always there. Evolution just fills in the gaps.

Radiation is one of the important factors in evolution. It causes mutation, and some level of mutation is actually good for evolution.

Your creatures can come into being only, like shoot from stem, as part of an endlessly renewed process of evolution.

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

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.

The whole [scientific] process resembles biological evolution. A problem is like an ecological niche, and a theory is like a gene or a species which is being tested for viability in that niche.

I'll admit that the discovery of evolution is humbling, but it is also empowering. It transforms our relationship to the life around us. Instead of being outsiders watching the natural world go by, we are insiders. We are part of the process; we are the exquisite result of billions of years of natural research and development.

Evolution is so creative. That's how we got giraffes.

The facts of variability, of the struggle for existence, of adaptation to conditions, were notorious enough; but none of us had suspected that the road to the heart of the species problem lay through them, until Darwin and Wallace dispelled the darkness.

That's evolution. Evolution's always hard. Hard and bleak. No such thing as happy evolution

Evolution happens. There's no football team in the world that has stayed together for time ever more.

Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me. This is easy to write, easy to read, and hard to believe.

Evolution is not something to be feared. It's to be celebrated, embraced, and understood.

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.

If we want to sum up the theory of evolution by natural selection in two words, which have great relevance for all societies and businesses, we should simply remember: diversity works.