Thomas Huxley Quotes

The story of evolution unfolds with increasing levels of abstraction.

I am a creationist and an evolutionist. Evolution is God's, or Nature's method of creation. Creation is not an event that happened in 4004 BC; it is a process that began some 10 billion years ago and is still under way.

In the most important sense a creationist is a person who believes in creation, and that includes people who believe that Genesis is a myth and that creation involved a process called evolution and consumed billions of years.

When I see how fast technology is advancing, my mind thinks of evolution and how organisms also have to evolve or adapt in order to, in their case, survive.

The idea that you would affect evolution is a very profound thing.

Probably all organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed.

Evolution, as such, is no longer a theory for a modern author. It is as much a fact as that the earth revolves around the sun.

What the evolutionist believes, on the basis of a mass of what seems to him un-refuted and irrefutable scientific evidence, is that the plants and animals and man and woman were not created by some sudden supernatural treatment of clay and ribs, but that they have slowly and gradually come into existence through the orderly processes of Nature extending over much time. He sees a fine and awe-inspiring order throughout Nature, some of which can be discovered and, in a measure, understood. He sees in this order, this immense capacity for natural being and doing and becoming, a beauty and majesty in Nature which cannot be transcended in conception. In recognizing the creation of man as its supreme achievement, he sees no belittling of man, but a proof of the extraordinary potentialities of this natural order. In organic evolution he sees just what the name signifies, the unfolding of organized matter, the outrolling of the possibilities of life.

Something theoretical in the past may become evident and established in the present or in the future. It is a self-evident fact that creation has an innate tendency towards perfection, and it is through this that creation is bound to the law of development or gradual perfection.

The theory of evolution, like the theory of gravity, is a scientific fact.

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

No evolution is accomplished in nature without revolution. Periods of very slow changes are succeeded by periods of violent changes. Revolutions are as necessary for evolution as the slow changes which prepare them and succeed them.

That great, mighty current of evolution which is advancing the life of everything in creation is simply invincible - no one can resist it.

I find it far more awesome, wonderful, that creation; our appearance in the world; should be the culmination, or at least one of the latest products of 3,000 Million years of organic evolution, than a kind of country trick, taking a rib out of a man's side in a trance.

I doubt evolution is real.

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.

Evolution is not something you can believe in or not believe in like do you believe in gravity.

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

Most species do their own evolving, making it up as they go along, which is the way Nature intended. And this is all very natural and organic and in tune with mysterious cycles of the cosmos, which believes that there's nothing like millions of years of really frustrating trial and error to give a species moral fiber and, in some cases, backbone.

Evolution is not truth; it is merely a hypothesis-it is millions of guesses strung together.

We're supposed to keep evolving. Evolution did not end with us growing opposable thumbs. You do know that, right?

God decided to create a species with whom he could have fellowship. Who are we to say that evolution was a dumb way to do it? It was an incredibly elegant way to do it.

Man is the result of a purposeless and materialistic process that did not have him in mind. He was not planned. He is a state of matter, a form of life, a sort of animal, and a species of the Order Primates, akin nearly or remotely to all of life and indeed to all that is material.

If I had to define life in a single phrase, I should clearly express my thought of throwing into relief one characteristic which, in my opinion, sharply differentiates biological science. I should say: life is creation.

There is in fact a controversy over Darwin's theory. Clearly both theories have religious implications. But this is not about God.