Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes

Natural selection certainly operates. It explains how bacteria will gain antibiotic resistance; it will explain how insects get insecticide resistance, but it doesn't explain how you get bacteria or insects in the first place.

Where do we say that a cell became a blade of grass, which became a starfish, which became a cat, which became a donkey, which became a human being? There's a real lack of evidence from change from actual species to a different type of species.

Would it be too bold to imagine that, in the great length of time since the earth began to exist, perhaps millions of ages before the commencement of the history of mankind would it be too bold to imagine that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament, which the great First Cause endued with animality, with the power of acquiring new parts, attended with new propensities, directed by irritations, sensations, volitions and associations, and thus possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down these improvements by generation to its posterity, world without end!

For my part, I hold it equally impossible for a small shellfish to be produced without generation as for a whale to have its origin from the mud.

Life cannot arise spontaneously but comes only from preexisting life.

Agricultural practice served Darwin as the material basis for the elaboration of his theory of Evolution, which explained the natural causation of the adaptation we see in the structure of the organic world. That was a great advance in the knowledge of living nature.

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

It is from the progeny of this parent cell that we all take our looks; we still share genes around, and the resemblance of the enzymes of grasses to those of whales is in fact a family resemblance.

Darwin based his theory on generalizations that were strictly empirical. You can go out and see that organisms do vary, that variations are inherited, and that every organism is capable of increasing its numbers in sufficiently favorable circumstances.

Evan Mecham proves that Darwin was wrong.

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

If a single cell, under appropriate conditions, becomes a man in the space of a few years, there can surely be no difficulty in understanding how, under appropriate conditions, a cell may, in the course of untold millions of years, give origin to the human race.

If death weren't around to 'finalize' the Darwinian process, we'd all still be amoebas.

The tree of life was always there. Evolution just fills in the gaps.

Chance is hugely significant in biology. In fact, the presence of apparent randomness in so many aspects of biology - from mutations in DNA to the chance involved in that one sperm reaching that one egg that became you - suggests that randomness is useful, even necessary, in very many cases.

On the theory of natural selection we can clearly understand the full meaning of that old canon in natural history, “Natura non facit saltum.” This canon, if we look only to the present inhabitants of the world, is not strictly correct, but if we include all those of past times, it must by my theory be strictly true.

I'm here as a product of process of evolution, which doesn't make very many exceptions. And which rates life relatively cheaply.

Man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits.

I think you can say that life is a system in which proteins and nucleic acids interact in ways that allow the structure to grow and reproduce. It's that growth and reproduction, the ability to make more of yourself, that's important.

As human beings, we are the genetic elite, the sentient, contemplating and innovating sum of countless genetic accidents and transcription errors.

Our young people - and adults - should be aware that considerable dissent exists in the scientific world regarding the validity of molecules-to-man evolution.

The cell, over the billions of years of her life, has covered the earth many times with her substance, found ways to control herself and her environment, and insure her survival.

It was a shock to people of the nineteenth century when they discovered, from observations science had made, that many features of the biological world could be ascribed to the elegant principle of natural selection.

Survival, in the cool economics of biology, means simply the persistence of one's own genes in the generations to follow.

We know evolution happened because innumerable bits of data from myriad fields of science conjoin to paint a rich portrait of life's pilgrimage.