Stephen Colbert Quotes

If you take a more Darwinian point of view the dynamics of the universe are such that as the universe evolved in time, complex systems arose out of the natural dynamics of the universe.

Habitats keep evolving new pageants of species, and we shouldn't interfere.

If you put a demo on the net and people say it was the finished version then they're going to say it sucks. I really hate that.

The process of speciation is completed with the cessation of genetic exchange.

Thus the genetic basis to the origin of bird species is to be sought in the inheritance of adult traits that are subject to natural and sexual selection.

Evolution is a process of constant branching and expansion.

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.

By contrast with history, evolution is an unconscious process. Another, and perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say that evolution is a natural process, history a human one....

… isolation, by checking immigration and consequently competition, will give time for any new variety to be slowly improved; and this may sometimes be of importance in the production of new species.

It {Darwin's theory of evolution] was a concept of such stunning simplicity, but it gave rise, naturally, to all of the infinite and baffling complexity of life. The awe it inspired in me made the awe that people talk about in respect of religious experience seem, frankly, silly beside it. I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.

Every living creature commences its existence under a form different from, and simpler than, that which it eventually attains.

Nature has unlimited time in which to travel along tortuous paths to an unknown destination. The mind of man is too feeble to discern whence or whither the path runs and has to be content if it can discern only portions of the track, however small.

Nature does not make leaps.

Stones grow, plants grow, and live, animals grow live and feel.

Most of life on Earth has a deep past, much deeper than ours. And we have benefited from the distillation of all preceding history, call it evolutionary history if you will.

The formation of different languages and of distinct species and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are curiously parallel.

If evolution works, why are monkeys still around?

Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.

The genome is a book that wrote itself, continually adding, deleting and amending over four billion years.

It took a couple of hundred million years to develop a thinking ape and you want a smart one in a lousy few hundred thousand?

That intermediate manifestation of the divine process which we call the DNA code has spent the last 2 billion years making this planet a Garden of Eden.

... many folks take them seriously because they just 'know' that evolution can never be seen in the immediate here and now. In fact, a precisely opposite situation prevails: biologists have documented a veritable glut of cases for rapid and eminently measurable evolution on timescales of years and decades.

One of the great breakthroughs of evolution theory is that you start with simple things and they will grow into complexity.

The three states of the caterpillar, larva, and butterfly have, since the time of the Greek poets, been applied to typify the human being,--its terrestrial form, apparent death, and ultimate celestial destination.

The student of Nature wonders the more and is astonished the less, the more conversant he becomes with her operations; but of all the perennial miracles she offers to his inspection, perhaps the most worthy of admiration is the development of a plant or of an animal from its embryo.