David Attenborough Quotes

Every animal would rather die themselves than lose their offspring. But it's just genes, isn't it? All of our existence is spent worrying about the next generation, but we don't actually seem to get anywhere.

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.

My theory of evolution is that Darwin was adopted.

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

Natural selection eliminates and maybe maintains, but it doesn't create.

As Darwin himself was at pains to point out, natural selection is all about differential survival within species, not between them.

New gene pools are generated in every generation, and evolution takes place because the successful individuals produced by these gene pools give rise to the next generation.

The Theory of Evolution has been proved true

The Theory of Evolution has had over a million chances to be wrong, but never has been.

The theory of evolution was not formally published until shortly before Faraday's death. Evolution was yet to be discovered during Faraday's life. Also, I don't think that Michael Faraday would claim that the Earth is extraordinarily young.

Natural Selection is not Evolution. Yet, ever since the two words have been in common use, the theory of Natural Selection has been employed as a convenient abbreviation for the theory of Evolution by means of Natural Selection, put forward by Darwin and Wallace. This has had the unfortunate consequence that the theory of Natural Selection itself has scarcely ever, if ever, received separate consideration.

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.

In the science, Evolution is a theory about changes; in the myth it is a fact about improvements.

Another curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it. I mean philosophers, social scientists, and so on. While in fact very few people understand it, actually, as it stands, even as it stood when Darwin expressed it, and even less as we now may be able to understand it in biology.

Opponents say natural selection is not a theory supported by observation or experiment; that it is not based on fact; and that it cannot be proved. Well, no, you cannot prove the theory to people who won't believe in it any more than you can prove that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066. However, we know the battle happened then, just as we know the course of evolution on earth unambiguously shows that Darwin was right.

A curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it.

The theory [of evolution] is a scientific mistake.

They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.

When discussing organic evolution the only point of agreement seems to be: ‘It happened.’ Thereafter, there is little consensus, which at first sight must seem rather odd.

For me, the meaning of life is pretty clear: Living things strive to pass their genes into the future.

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 from biology that new forms of organisms simulate their primitive form as closely as possible at first, even though obliged to exist under changed internal and external conditions.

In courtship, who wins and who loses will determine who passes on their DNA to tomorrow.

Animals have genes for altruism, and those genes have been selected in the evolution of many creatures because of the advantage they confer for the continuing survival of the species.