Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes

We learn geology the morning after the earthquake, on ghastly diagrams of cloven mountains, upheaved plains, and the dry bed of the sea.

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.

Thus it cannot be denied that the masses which today form our highest mountains were originally in a liquid state; for a long time they were covered by waters which did not sustain any life.

If you could drive straight down, into a tunnel bored through the crust of the planet, you'd hit this molten mess in about an hour. It's called the asthenosphere - a sluggish sea, several hundred miles thick, on which floats the Earth's cool epidermis - the so-called tectonic plates.

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

We owe our existence to innovation. Our species exists thanks to four billion years of genetic innovation.

Unfortunately, we haven't found many very old rocks on Earth because our planet's surface is constantly renewed by plate tectonics, coupled with erosion.

The proof of evolution lies in those adaptations that arise from improbable foundations.

Natural selection is not evolution.

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.

The traces of upheavals become more impressive when one moves a little higher, when one gets even closer to the foot of the great mountain ranges. There are still plenty of shell layers. We notice them, even thicker and more solid ones.

If we strike a line to the N.W. from Sydney to Wellington Valley, we shall find that little change takes place in the geological features of the country.

The Theory of Evolution has been proved true

The facts of evolution are clear and are not disputed by any serious scientific worker. The universe is over 11 billion years old, and the earth, in particular, is over 4 billion. That is a fact. Life on earth is at least 2.5 billion years old, and, as new evidence accumulates, the best estimate of the origin of life gets pushed further and further into the past. That too is fact. It is also a fact that there were no mammals or birds 200 million years ago and no vertebrates 600 million years ago, while there are no dinosaurs now. Finally, it is a fact that under con- ditions that have existed on earth for the last billion years, at least, all living organisms arise from previously living organisms. So, the present complex living forms have evolved by an unbroken and continuous process from the simplest living forms of the pre-Cambrian era. To as- sert, on the contrary, that the earth and life on it are a paltry ten or hundred thousand years old and that the complex forms living today arose in an instant from unorganized matter is in contradiction not simply with the corpus of biological knowledge but with all scientific knowl- edge of the physical world. To deny evolution is to deny physics, chemistry, and astronomy, as well as biology

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....

The Theory of Evolution has had over a million chances to be wrong, but never has been.

… 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.

Throughout the kingdom of life, plant as well as animal, the overproduction of individuals and their reduction by death to a fractional part of the original number is one of the basic conditions of progress, if Darwinism is a sound explanation of organic evolution. For this death will be in the nature of things selective, and hence will make for the modification of the species toward a condition of better adaptation to conditions of life. Indeed, the upholders of war have used precisely the argument of war's high mortality as a proof of war's real beneficence to the race.

The fuel for evolution is diversity, with natural selection leading to continuous adaptations and improvements in Nature's handiwork.

Radiation is one of the important factors in evolution. It causes mutation, and some level of mutation is actually good for evolution.

We may confidently come to the conclusion, that the forces which slowly and by little starts uplift continents, and that those which at successive periods pour forth volcanic matter from open orifices, are identical.

Most species do their own evolving, making it up as they go along, which is the way Nature intended.

Why are the bones of great fishes, and oysters and corals and various other shells and sea-snails, found on the high tops of mountains that border the sea, in the same way in which they are found in the depths of the sea?

The more I study nature, the more I become impressed with ever-increasing force with the conclusion, that the contrivances and beautiful adaptations slowly acquired through each part occasionally varying in a slight degree but in many ways, with the preservation or natural selection of those variations which are beneficial to the organism under the complex and ever-varying conditions of life, transcend in an incomparable degree the contrivances and adaptations which the most fertile imagination of man could suggest with unlimited time at his disposal.

Let's set the existence-of-God issue aside for a later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored. Most of them failed, and their genetic legacy was erased from the universe forever, but a few found some way to survive and to propagate.