Michael Denton Quotes

Every cell is a triumph of natural selection, and we’re made of trillions of cells. Within us, is a little universe.

Proponents of intelligent design don't accept that some of the very complex nanomachines that we have inside ourselves could have come about solely on the basis of natural selection.

The question is: exactly how did life get here? Was it by natural selection and random mutation or was it by something else? Everybody - even Richard Dawkins - sees design in biology. You see this design when you see co-ordinated parts coming together to perform a function - like in a hand. And so it's the appearance of design that everybody's trying to explain. So that if Darwin's theory doesn't explain it we're left with no other explanation than maybe it really was designed. That's essentially the design argument.

If I brought you down to the size of an individual cell so that you could see your body from that perspective, it would offer a whole new view of the world. When you looked back at yourself from that perspective you would not see yourself as a single entity. You would see yourself as a bustling community of more than 50 trillion individual cells.

I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one.

The RNA World referred to an hypothetical stage in the origin of life on Earth.

Most of the things at the zoo don't look like us. We're one design that works. Our chimp pals sort of look like us, so that's a different take on the same basic design. But fish don't look like us, and giraffes don't. They look a little like us, but not too much. And insects certainly don't look like us, and they work just fine.

Intelligent design, unlike creationism, is a science in its own right and can stand on its own feet.

The way I define 'intelligent design' is that when people started out, we wanted to make sense of the world we lived in, so we created stories about how things worked.

As the Industrial Age is drawing to a close, I think that we're witnessing the dawn of the era of biological design.

In a biological system, the software builds its own hardware, but design is critical, and if you start with digital information, it has to be really accurate.

I don't know whether the universe contains any evidence of intelligent design, but I can assure you that thousands of everyday products do not.

The argument for intelligent design basically depends on saying, 'You haven't answered every question with evolution,'... Well, guess what? Science can't answer every question.

Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.

Mother Nature has been the best bioengineer in history. Why not harness the evolutionary process to design proteins?

No human can design a good enzyme, yet we are surrounded by them after 3.5 billion years of work by evolution.

In the end, it's clear that the incorporation of synthetic biology in product and architectural design will enable the transition from designs that are inspired by nature to designs made with and by nature to, possibly, designing nature herself.

The concept of God is generated by a brain designed by evolution to find design in nature (a very recursive idea).

A cell is a complex structure, with its investing membrane, nucleus, and nucleolus.

Design in nature is but a concatenation of accidents, culled by natural selection until the result is so beautiful or effective as to seem a miracle of purpose.

Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists-whether through design or stupidity, I do not know-as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups.

Omnis cellula e cellula," he said again. "All cells come from cells. Every cell is born of a previous cell, which was born of a previous cell. Life comes from life. Life begets life begets life begets life begets life.

The traditional view of purpose says it comes from on high, from God, from the Creator. Darwin's idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition. Whereas people used to think of meaning coming from on high and being ordained from the top down, now we have Darwin saying, "No, all of this design can happen, all of this purpose can emerge from the bottom up without any direction at all."

Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.

I've always felt that the placement of a man's testicles is an eloquent argument against intelligent design.