Louis Agassiz Quotes

We think we know that chimpanzees are higher animals and earthworms are lower, we think we've always known what that means, and we think evolution makes it even clearer. But it doesn't. It is by no means clear that it means anything at all. Or if it means anything, it means so many different things to be misleading, even pernicious.

Extinction has only separated groups: it has by no means made them; for if every form which has ever lived on this earth were suddenly to reappear, though it would be quite impossible to give definitions by which each group could be distinguished from other groups, as all would blend together by steps as fine as those between the finest existing varieties, nevertheless a natural classification, or at least a natural arrangement, would be possible.

From the first dawn of life, all organic beings are found to resemble each other in descending degrees, so that they can be classed in groups under groups. This classification is evidently not arbitrary like the grouping of stars in constellations.

In general, the more one augments the number of divisions of the productions of nature, the more one approaches the truth, since in nature only individuals exist, while genera, orders, and classes only exist in our imagination.

Cuvier had preceded Lamarck in specifying the kinds and degrees of variation, which his own observations and critical judgment of the reports of others led him to admit.

It was implicitly supposed that every living thing was distinctively plant or animal; that there were real and profound differences between the two, if only they could be seized.

A creationist can embarrass an evolutionist by asking for a definition of species.

Species can be recognized by their morphological characteristics and songs.

One thing scientists do is to find order among a large number of facts, and one way to do that across fields as diverse as biology, geology, physics and astronomy is through classification.

Most people are surprised when they hear my somber figures: we know of 2 million species of plants, animals and microorganisms, and we can give them each a scientific name and a diagnostic description. We know, perhaps generously, more than just a little bit of the anatomy in no more than 10 percent. We have done thorough studies in fewer than one-tenth of 1 percent. And the total number of species on Earth is unknown to the nearest order of magnitude.

If man had not been his own classifier, he would never have thought of founding a separate order for his own reception.

It is a truly wonderful fact - the wonder of which we are apt to overlook from familiarity - that all animals and all plants throughout all time and space should be related to each other in group subordinate to group.

By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.

The chicken is a dinosaur. I mean, it really is. You can't argue with it, because we're the classifiers and we've classified it that way.

It is the genus that gives the characters, and not the characters that make the genus.

Nomenclature, the other foundation of botany, should provide the names as soon as the classification is made... If the names are unknown knowledge of the things also perishes... For a single genus, a single name.

Taxonomy (the science of classification) is often undervalued as a glorified form of filing-with each species in its folder, like a stamp in its prescribed place in an album; but taxonomy is a fundamental and dynamic science, dedicated to exploring the causes of relationships and similarities among organisms. Classifications are theories about the basis of natural order, not dull catalogues compiled only to avoid chaos.

The mathematical thermology created by Fourier may tempt us to hope that, as he has estimated the temperature of the space in which we move, me may in time ascertain the mean temperature of the heavenly bodies: but I regard this order of facts as for ever excluded from our recognition. We can never learn their internal constitution, nor, in regard to some of them, how heat is absorbed by their atmosphere. We may therefore define Astronomy as the science by which we discover the laws of the geometrical and mechanical phenomena presented by the heavenly bodies.

In the final analysis the hierarchic pattern is nothing like the straightforward witness for organic evolution that is commonly assumed. There are facets of the hierarchy which do not flow naturally from any sort of random undirected evolutionary process. If the hierarchy suggests any model of nature it is typology and not evolution. How much easier it would be to argue the case for evolution if all nature's divisions were blurred and indistinct, if the systema naturalae was largely made up of overlapping classes indicative of sequence and continuity.

Civilization means food and literature all round. Beefsteaks and fiction magazines for all. First-class proteins for the body, fourth-class love-stories for the spirit.

The word 'freedom' means for me not a point of departure but a genuine point of arrival. The point of departure is defined by the word 'order.' Freedom cannot exist without the concept of order.

This is the difference between slavery and freedom. The slave must do what his superior orders him to do, but the free citizen-and this is what freedom means-is in a position to choose his own way of life.

By profession a biologist, [Thomas Henry Huxley] covered in fact the whole field of the exact sciences, and then bulged through its four fences. Absolutely nothing was uninteresting to him. His curiosity ranged from music to theology and from philosophy to history. He didn't simply know something about everything; he knew a great deal about everything.

Going out to others in order to reach the fringes of humanity does not mean rushing out aimlessly into the world. Often it is better simply to slow down, to put aside our eagerness in order to see and listen to others, to stop rushing from one thing to another and to remain with someone who has faltered along the way.

If we are prepared to take the life of another being merely in order to satisfy our taste for a particular type of food, then that being is no more than a means to our end.