Christopher Hitchens Quotes

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

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

Evolution is one of the most powerful and important ideas ever developed in the history of science. Every question it raises leads to new answers, new discoveries, and new smarter questions. The science of evolution is as expansive as nature itself. It is also the most meaningful creation story that humans have ever found.

The story of evolution unfolds with increasing levels of abstraction.

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.

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

[Evolution] doesn't mean God-guided, gradual creation. It means unguided, purposeless change. The Darwinian theory doesn't say that God created slowly. It says that naturalistic evolution is the creator, and so God had nothing to do with it.

Evolution has been observed. It's just that it hasn't been observed while it's happening.

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.

It is grindingly, creakingly, crashingly obvious that if Darwinism was really a theory of chance, it could not work.

Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is the only workable explanation that has ever been proposed for the remarkable fact of our own existence, indeed the existence of all life wherever it may turn up in the universe.

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

I mean, in a way, I feel that one of the reasons for learning about Darwinian evolution is as an object lesson in how not to set up our values and social lives.

To put it bluntly but fairly, anyone today who doubts that the variety of life on this planet was produced by a process of evolution is simply ignorant — inexcusably ignorant, in a world where three out of four people have learned to read and write.

Evolution is no linear family tree, but change in the single multidimensional being that has grown to cover the entire surface of Earth.

From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of higher animals, directly follows.

That there is an evolution of one sort or another is now common ground among scientists. Whether or not that evolution is directed is another question.

You know what, evolution is a myth. ... Why aren't monkeys still evolving into humans?

We're not the best, but we happen to be what evolution came up with.

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

[Evolution is] one of the best documented, most compelling and exciting concepts in all of science.

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)

It {Darwin's theory of evolution] was a concept of such stunning simplicity, but it gave rise, naturally, to all of the infinite and baffling complexity of life. The awe it inspired in me made the awe that people talk about in respect of religious experience seem, frankly, silly beside it. I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.

It's like saying that two and two equals four, but if you wish to believe it, it could also be five ... Evolution is not a theory; it is a fact, every bit as much as the historical fact that William the Conqueror landed in 1066.

What is evolution if not creative adaptation and the progression of our own souls?