Terry Pratchett Quotes

Most species do their own evolving, making it up as they go along, which is the way Nature intended. And this is all very natural and organic and in tune with mysterious cycles of the cosmos, which believes that there's nothing like millions of years of really frustrating trial and error to give a species moral fiber and, in some cases, backbone.

Evolution is so creative. That's how we got giraffes.

The fossil record implies trial and error, an inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with an efficient Great Designer (although not with a Designer of a more remote and indirect temperament)

The whole [scientific] process resembles biological evolution. A problem is like an ecological niche, and a theory is like a gene or a species which is being tested for viability in that niche.

The story of evolution unfolds with increasing levels of abstraction.

The secrets of evolution are death and time-the deaths of enormous numbers of lifeforms that were imperfectly adapted to the environment; and time for a long succession of small mutations.

Evolution is not something to be feared. It's to be celebrated, embraced, and understood.

Evolution is, as well as smarter than we are, infinitely more callous and cruel, and also capricious.

Pretty much every plant and animal alive today is the result of eons of natural cross-breeding.

We are the product of 4.5 billion years of fortuitous, slow biological evolution. There is no reason to think that the evolutionary process has stopped. Man is a transitional animal. He is not the climax of creation.

The tree of life was always there. Evolution just fills in the gaps.

Your creatures can come into being only, like shoot from stem, as part of an endlessly renewed process of evolution.

I have always had this basic biological question in terms of evolution, if the drive to evolution is to like survive. An organism that survives well, there is really no need for consciousness in there.

What is evolution if not creative adaptation and the progression of our own souls?

This fundamental subject of Natural Selection will be treated at some length in the fourth chapter; and we shall then see how Natural Selection almost inevitably causes much Extinction of the less improved forms of life and induces what I have called Divergence of Character.

Evolution has been observed. It's just that it hasn't been observed while it's happening.

Evolution is one of the most powerful and important ideas ever developed in the history of science. Every question it raises leads to new answers, new discoveries, and new smarter questions. The science of evolution is as expansive as nature itself. It is also the most meaningful creation story that humans have ever found.

I'll admit that the discovery of evolution is humbling, but it is also empowering. It transforms our relationship to the life around us. Instead of being outsiders watching the natural world go by, we are insiders. We are part of the process; we are the exquisite result of billions of years of natural research and development.

It was Darwin's chief contribution, not only to Biology but to the whole of natural science, to have brought to light a process by which contingencies a priori improbable, are given, in the process of time, an increasing probability, until it is their non-occurrence rather than their occurrence which becomes highly improbable.

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.

I am an enthusiastic Darwinian, but I think Darwinism is too big a theory to be confined to the narrow context of the gene.

That's evolution. Evolution's always hard. Hard and bleak. No such thing as happy evolution

Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me. This is easy to write, easy to read, and hard to believe.

Natural selection operates according to immediate cirumstances and not toward a long-term goal. Homo sapiens did eventually evolve as a descendant of the first humans, but there was nothing inevitable about it.

... if variations useful to any organic being do occur, assuredly individuals thus characterized will have the best chance of being perserved in the struggle for life; and from the strong principle of inheritance they will tend to produce offsping similarly characterized. This principle of preservation, I have called, for the sake of brevity, Natural Selection.