Charles Darwin Quotes

When I think about life on Earth, there should not be a species like us. And if there was, we should be out in the jungle killing each other in small groups. That's what you should expect.

If insemination were the sole biological function of sex, it could be achieved far more economically in a few seconds of mounting and insertion. Indeed, the least social of mammals mate with scarcely more ceremony. The species that have evolved long-term bonds are also, by and large, the ones that rely on elaborate courtship rituals. . . . Love and sex do indeed go together.

I have been scientifically studying the traits and dispositions of the "lower animals" (so-called) and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the result profoundly humiliating to me. For it obliges me to renounce my allegiance to the Darwinian theory of the Ascent of Man from the Lower Animals; since it now seems plain to me that that theory ought to be vacated in favor of a new and truer one, this new and truer one to be named the Descent of Man from the Higher Animals.

The modesty of women, which, in its most primitive form among animals, is based on sexual periodicity, is, with that periodicity, an essential condition of courtship.

The natural world is full of females falling hard for stupid male display behavior, including bright feathers, big antlers, and bombastic courtship rituals.

The evolution of sex is the hardest problem in evolutionary biology.

We probably, as primitive people, made music before we actually had a language, and that's where language comes from.

If there were no Adam and Eve and we’re all evolved from apelike ancestors and there’s homosexuality in the animal world and if Genesis is mythology, then you can justify any behavior you want.

All human behavior, all human motivations, all man’s hopes and fears, were heavily colored and largely controlled by mankind’s tragic and oddly beautiful pattern of reproduction.

Recently, I've ventured into the mammal family - so that's good for my sex life.

Certain anthropologists hold that man, having discovered tools, ceased to evolve biologically. Animals, never having discovered them, continue to fashion drills out of their beaks, oars out of their hind feet, wings out of their forefeet, suits of armor out of their hides, levers out of their horns, saws out of their teeth. Whether this be true or not, all authorities agree that man is the tool-using animal. It sets him off from the rest of the animal kingdom as drastically as does speech.

Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it; let's do it, let's fall in love.

Darwin theorized that mankind (both male and female) evolved alongside each other over millions of years, both reproducing after their own kind before the ability to physically have sex evolved. They did this through "asexuality" ("without sexual desire or activity or lacking any apparent sex or sex organs"). Each of them split in half.

I can't mate in captivity.

With mammals the male appears to win the female much more through the law of battle than through the display of his charms.

The music of all creatures has to do with their loves, even of toads and frogs. Is it not the same with man?

Once you were apes, yet even now man is more of an ape than any of the apes.

Ladies, you may not realize this, understand this, or even believe this, but everything else we do is ultimately for you. Men don't do anything-create art, build businesses, donate to charity, invent things, or do anything noteworthy-for any reason other than to impress women, and thus get them to have sex with us. If women didn't exist, we'd still just be naked grunting apes living in caves. In a very real way, pussy is the key to human civilization. You don't have to like it, but it's a fact; if you understand it, you understand men.

We have reason to believe that man first walked upright to free his hands for masturbation.

All you have to do is mate.

To think that humans evolved from lower species BUT the evolutionary process somehow came to a halt and we all arrived at the finish line simultaneously is to embrace a fiction possibly more implausible than Christianity.

For the butterfly, mating and propagation involve the sacrifice of life, for the human being, the sacrifice of beauty.

Human beings are social animals. We were social before we were human.

We lost this animal instinct that we used to have. We use a very low percentage of our instinct.