Asa Gray Quotes

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.

There have only been about a half dozen genuinely important events in the four-billion-year saga of life on Earth: single-celled life, multicelled life, differentiation into plants and animals, movement of animals from water to land, and the advent of mammals and consciousness.

Species can be recognized by their morphological characteristics and songs.

Islands are natural workshops of evolution.

First, Darwinian theory tells us how a certain amount of diversity in life forms can develop once we have various types of complex living organisms already in existence.

Natural history is not about producing fables.

Evolution is one of the two or three most primally fascinating subjects in all the sciences.

If humans evolved in a tiny area of Africa, they only saw plants and animals within a 100-kilometre radius for a million years. When they began to migrate, there would have been different animals and plants - and potentially a lot of allergy issues.

Cuvier had preceded Lamarck in specifying the kinds and degrees of variation, which his own observations and critical judgment of the reports of others led him to admit.

If you really want to study evolution, you've got go outside sometime, because you'll see symbiosis everywhere!

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

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.

In October, 1838, … I happened to read for amusement Malthus on population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long continuous observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favorable variations would tend to be preserved and unfavorable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work

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

As some species die out, forms better adapted to utilize the obstacles against which they struggled in vain come into being.

A grain in the balance will determine which individual shall live and which shall die - which variety or species shall increase in number, and which shall decrease, or finally become extinct.

It was the bumble bee and the butterfly who survived, not the dinosaur.

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

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.

To many people, 'biodiversity' is almost synonymous with the word 'nature,' and 'nature' brings to mind steamy forests and the big creatures that dwell there. Fair enough. But biodiversity is much more than that, for it encompasses not only the diversity of species, but also the diversity within species.

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.

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.

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

The problem when arguing with those who believe in atheistic evolution is that they move goal posts by redefining atheism or evolution or the word 'species.'

I was brought up to understand Darwin's theory of evolution. I spent hours and hours in the Natural History Museum in London looking at the descriptions of how different kinds of animals had evolved, looking at the sequence of fossil bones looking gradually more and more and more and more like the modern fossil.