Antoinette Brown Blackwell Quotes

Natural selection is not an inflammatory phrase; evolution is.

The evolution of sex is the hardest problem in evolutionary biology.

Bottom line - cosmetics are used to accentuate an existing sex difference in facial contrast. This does not mean that women engage in this beautification practice with knowledge of this sexual dimorphism.

Evolutionary psychology offers a parsimonious framework for understanding which domains are likely to yield sex differences and, if so, in which direction.

Evolution is a laughing matter for anybody that's got a rational mind.

The natural world is full of females falling hard for stupid male display behavior, including bright feathers, big antlers, and bombastic courtship rituals.

It was a shock to people of the nineteenth century when they discovered, from observations science had made, that many features of the biological world could be ascribed to the elegant principle of natural selection.

The concept of evolution postulates that living organisms have common roots, and in turn, the existence of common features is powerful support for the concept of evolution.

The stupendous time spans of the evolutionary past are now part of common culture (though maybe not in the United States Bible Belt, nor in parts of the Islamic world). Most people are at ease with the idea that our present biosphere is the outcome of four billion years of Darwinian evolution.

The fact - not theory - that evolution has occurred and the Darwinian theory as to how it occurred have become so confused in popular opinion that the distinction must be stressed.

Essential to the theory of evolution is the premise that everything has come into being by itself.

Evolution has programmed our brains to find two things particularly interesting, and therefore memorable: jokes and sex - and especially, it seems, jokes about sex.

Of course, there is no reconciliation between the theory of evolution by natural selection and the traditional religious view of the origin of the human mind.

Evan Mecham proves that Darwin was wrong.

New knowledge has led to the recognition in the theory of evolution of more than a hypothesis. It is indeed remarkable that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge. The convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favor of this theory.

The preoccupation with the choice of a mate both by male and female I regard as a continuing echo of the major selective force by which we have evolved.

It takes a long time before we really get to grips with this [Darwin's 'On the Origin of Species'] and begin to understand it, because not only does it seem incredible and thoroughly demeaning to us, but it's yet another shock to our system to discover that not only are we not the centre of the Universe and we're not made by anything, but we started out as some kind of slime and got to where we are via being a monkey. It just doesn't read well.

If insemination were the sole biological function of sex, it could be achieved far more economically in a few seconds of mounting and insertion. Indeed, the least social of mammals mate with scarcely more ceremony. The species that have evolved long-term bonds are also, by and large, the ones that rely on elaborate courtship rituals. . . . Love and sex do indeed go together.

I love the idea of there being two sexes, don't you?

His subject is the "Origin of Species," & not the origin of Organization; & it seems a needless mischief to have opened the latter speculation at all.

In the science, Evolution is a theory about changes; in the myth it is a fact about improvements.

What! Did Sir W[alter] R[aleigh] believe that a male and female ounce (and, if so, why not two tigers and lions, etc?) would have produced, in a course of generations, a cat, or a cat a lion? This is Darwinizing with a vengeance.

I'm not an historian but I'll venture an opinion: Modern cosmology really began with Darwin and Wallace. Unlike anyone before them, they provided explanations of our existence that completely rejected supernatural agents... Darwin and Wallace set a standard not only for the life sciences but for cosmology as well.

I believe in the difference between men and women. In fact, I embrace the difference.

Aristotle especially, both by speculation and observation... reached something like the modern idea of a succession of higher organizations from lower, and made the fruitful suggestion of "a perfecting principle" in Nature. With the coming in of Christian theology this tendency toward a yet truer theory of evolution was mainly stopped, but the old crude view remained.