Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

The laws of nature are structured so that we grow and change, and get to experience the full spectrum of biological existence.

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.

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

Some species increase, others diminish, and in a short space the generations of living creatures are changed and, like runners, pass on the torch of life.

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.

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

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.

As you kind of get over the anxiety about [science and evolution], it actually adds to your sense of awe about this amazing universe that we live in, it doesn't subtract from it at all.

Rather than be afraid of evolution and try to stifle inquiry, people should revel in the joys of knowing and find a serenity and a joy in being a part the rest of life on Earth. Not apart from it, but a part of it.

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

If the germ plasm wants to swim in the ocean, it makes itself a fish; if the germ plasm wants to fly in the air, it makes itself a bird. If it wants to go to Harvard, it makes itself a man. The strangest thing of all is that the germ plasm that we carry around within us has done all those things. There was a time, hundreds of millions of years ago, when it was making fish. Then ... amphibia ... reptiles ... mammals, and now it's making men.

We are all but recent leaves on the same old tree of life and if this life has adapted itself to new functions and conditions, it uses the same old basic principles over and over again. There is no real difference between the grass and the man who mows it.

Evolution is, as well as smarter than we are, infinitely more callous and cruel, and also capricious.

...there are no natural borderlines in evolution. The illusion of a borderline is created by the fact that the evolutionary intermediates happen to be extinct.

Evolution in nature is not opposed to the notion of Creation, because evolution presupposes the creation of beings that evolve.

Even if there were no actual evidence in favor of the Darwinian theory, we should still be justified in preferring it over all rival theories.

I have come to recognize evolution not only as an active process that I am experiencing at the time, but as something I can guide by the choices I make.

Evolution has primarily been an attack on religion by militant atheists who wrap themselves in the mantle of science in an effort to refute all religious claims concerning a creator - an effort that has also often attempted to suppress all scientific criticisms of Darwin's work.

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.

Most Americans have their head in the sand about evolution.

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

Simple DNA gradually morphed and evolved, so that you had the coming into being of ever more complex and diverse creatures, until one day you wake up and find there are peacocks and giraffes. Nature is an open-ended experiment based on morphing a DNA code, and ours is an open-ended experiment based on morphing a crochet code.