Martin Rees Quotes

Evolution acts slowly. Our psychological characteristics today are those that promoted reproductive success in the ancestral environmen.

A probing analysis of the problems of evolution forms the basis of my prose.

With evolution, things are always changing, so I sort of think: Should we all be growing three heads?

Darwin's theory of evolution is a framework by which we understand the diversity of life on Earth. But there is no equation sitting there in Darwin's 'Origin of Species' that you apply and say, 'What is this species going to look like in 100 years or 1,000 years?' Biology isn't there yet with that kind of predictive precision.

I have a strong feeling that the subject of evolution is beautiful without the excuse of creationists needing to be bashed.

Evolution, of course, is not something that simply applies to life here on earth; it applies to the whole universe.

Evolution is a theory, and it's a theory that you can test. We've tested evolution in many ways. You can't present good evidence that says evolution is not a fact.

This all comes down to what we know about life on Earth.

Life on our planet has been a constant series of cataclysmic events, and we are more suitable for extinction than a trilobite or a reptile. So we will vanish. There's no doubt in my heart.

The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program.

The way to understand how different species evolved is to think about the niches that they fill in an ecosystem - basically, how they make a living.

You can't even begin to understand biology, you can't understand life, unless you understand what it's all there for, how it arose - and that means evolution.

Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.

It is difficult to imagine evolution in alien planets operating in any manner other than Darwinian.

Scientific theories carry some weight, but evolution, I think everyone would agree, is not a proven fact.

Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution—paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce.

The facts of evolution are clear and are not disputed by any serious scientific worker. The universe is over 11 billion years old, and the earth, in particular, is over 4 billion. That is a fact. Life on earth is at least 2.5 billion years old, and, as new evidence accumulates, the best estimate of the origin of life gets pushed further and further into the past. That too is fact. It is also a fact that there were no mammals or birds 200 million years ago and no vertebrates 600 million years ago, while there are no dinosaurs now. Finally, it is a fact that under con- ditions that have existed on earth for the last billion years, at least, all living organisms arise from previously living organisms. So, the present complex living forms have evolved by an unbroken and continuous process from the simplest living forms of the pre-Cambrian era. To as- sert, on the contrary, that the earth and life on it are a paltry ten or hundred thousand years old and that the complex forms living today arose in an instant from unorganized matter is in contradiction not simply with the corpus of biological knowledge but with all scientific knowl- edge of the physical world. To deny evolution is to deny physics, chemistry, and astronomy, as well as biology

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

Evolution never stops or ends. Such a cessation would be cataclysmic catastrophe.

Is evolution a theory, a system, or an hypothesis? It is much more: it is a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow and which they must satisfy henceforward if they are to be thinkable and true.

In the course of evolution, it constantly happens that, independently of each other, two different forms of life take similar, parallel paths in adapting themselves to the same external circumstances.

Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun.

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

Evolution is the fundamental idea in all of life science - in all of biology.

Evolution is a tinkerer.