Michael Denton Quotes

Order, unity, and continuity are human inventions, just as truly as catalogues and encyclopedias.

Nature does not proceed by leaps and bounds.

Natural history is not about producing fables.

We are a categorically obsessed culture, where we have to compartmentalize everything in reference to another thing, like, 'What does it sound like? Does it sound like this?'

I love taxonomies, categories, ways of dividing people into groups.

The former conviction that these two kingdoms were wholly different in structure, in function, and in kind of life, was not seriously disturbed by the difficulties which the naturalist encountered when he undertook to define them.

One change always leaves the way open for the establishment of others.

The earth's crust has not yet stopped heaving and plunging under our feet. Mountain ranges are still being thrust up on the horizon. Granites are still growing under the continental masses. Nor has the organic world ceased to produce new buds at the tips of its countless branches.

Everything evolves, not just music.

One thing scientists do is to find order among a large number of facts, and one way to do that across fields as diverse as biology, geology, physics and astronomy is through classification.

Never have varmints, only grandvarmints.

I think continuity is a good thing. But change is sometimes good, too.

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

We have really, that I know of, no philosophical basis for high and low. Moreover, the vegetable kingdom does not culminate, as the animal kingdom does. It is not a kingdom, but a common-wealth; a democracy, and therefore puzzling and unaccountable from the former point of view.

Humanity looks to me like a magnificent beginning but not the final word.

Evolution happens. There's no football team in the world that has stayed together for time ever more.

Nature does not proceed by leaps.

Progress is not accomplished in one stage.

All the different classes of beings which taken together make up the universe are, in the ideas of God who knows distinctly their essential gradations, only so many ordinates of a single curve so closely united that it would be impossible to place others between any two of them, since that would imply disorder and imperfection. Thus men are linked with the animals, these with the plants and these with the fossils which in turn merge with those bodies which our senses and our imagination represent to us as absolutely inanimate.

Extinction has only separated groups: it has by no means made them; for if every form which has ever lived on this earth were suddenly to reappear, though it would be quite impossible to give definitions by which each group could be distinguished from other groups, as all would blend together by steps as fine as those between the finest existing varieties, nevertheless a natural classification, or at least a natural arrangement, would be possible.

The chicken is a dinosaur. I mean, it really is. You can't argue with it, because we're the classifiers and we've classified it that way.

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.

In general, the more one augments the number of divisions of the productions of nature, the more one approaches the truth, since in nature only individuals exist, while genera, orders, and classes only exist in our imagination.

Classes? Categories? Was that what we had come to?

Because some stories end, but old stories go on, and you gotta dance to the music if you want to stay ahead