Paul Bettany Quotes

In the game of life, less diversity means fewer options for change. Wild or domesticated, panda or pea, adaptation is the requirement for survival.

Evolution isn't just a take-it-or-leave-it story about where we came from. It's an epic at the centre of life itself. It tells us we are part of nature in every respect.

Mr. Darwin contributes some striking and ingenious instances of the way in which the principle partially affects the chain, or rather network of life, even to the total obliteration of certain meshes.

Evolution is cleverer than you are.

We should not live by Darwinian principles. But Darwin explains how we got here.

We share deep admiration for evolution, a force of Nature that has led to the finest chemistry of all time, and to all living things on this planet.

Evolution is good for optimising and that is well understood. But evolution also creates things that no one knew were even possible.

We're not the best, but we happen to be what evolution came up with.

Everything has to evolve or else it perishes.

Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress.

People will say, "You're never going to convince me that something as complicated as an eye could come about by sheer chance." And the answer is that natural selection is the very opposite of sheer chance. Natural selection is a non-random process.

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

The beauty of evolution is that it does provide an explanation of how you can get complexity out of simplicity. It does it by slow, gradual degree. At no point are you postulating the sudden coming into existence of a complicated being.

On the theory of natural selection we can clearly understand the full meaning of that old canon in natural history, “Natura non facit saltum.” This canon, if we look only to the present inhabitants of the world, is not strictly correct, but if we include all those of past times, it must by my theory be strictly true.

Evolution isn't just a story about where we came from. It's an epic at the center of life itself. Far from robbing our lives of meaning, it instills an appreciation for the beautiful, enduring, and ultimately triumphant fabric of life that covers our planet. Understanding that doesn't demean human life - it enhances it.

Human evolution, at first, seems extraordinary. How could the process that gave rise to slugs and oak trees and fish produce a creature that can fly to the moon and invent the Internet and cross the ocean in boats?

For me, the level at which natural selection causes the phenomenon of adaptation is the level of the replicator - the gene.

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.

Since natural selection requires a function to select, an irreducibly complex biological system, if there is such a thing, would have to arise as an integrated unit for natural selection to have anything to act on.

To inquire into the origin of life is like seeking the origin of electrical machinery or the origin of music. Every increase in complexity of arrangement, of form, of substance, leads to new and often incalculable properties.

A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known.

When I see how fast technology is advancing, my mind thinks of evolution and how organisms also have to evolve or adapt in order to, in their case, survive.

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

If evolution really works, how come mothers only have two hands?

The human's place in the universe will be set in the scheme of evolution, the product of our biological inheritance.