Frans Lanting Quotes

The Galapagos Islands are probably the most famous wildlife-watching destination in the world. And no wonder - it's almost impossible to exaggerate the sheer spectacle of the place that provided inspiration for Charles Darwin's ground-breaking theory of natural selection.

When I was about ten, I discovered evolution by reading a book by Wilhelm Boelsche and seeing a picture of Archaeopteryx.

Darwin himself recorded the fact that he accepted the Malthusian idea.

All evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence... I had to place myself amidst the variation.

Islands are natural workshops of evolution.

I was brought up to understand Darwin's theory of evolution. I spent hours and hours in the Natural History Museum in London looking at the descriptions of how different kinds of animals had evolved, looking at the sequence of fossil bones looking gradually more and more and more and more like the modern fossil.

No naturalist has devoted more painstaking attention to the structure of the barnacles than Mr. Darwin.

The naturalists of our own time hold equal faith in the wonders of the sea, but seek therein rather for the links of nature's chain than for apparent exceptions.

Charles Darwin sailed around the world for two years on the 'Beagle,' and he had quite a bit of interest in things like the iguanas of the Galapagos, even though they were primitive compared to your average Englishman.

In all works on Natural History, we constantly find details of the marvellous adaptation of animals to their food, their habits, and the localities in which they are found.

Unless one is a religious fundamentalist and believes that man was created in the image and likeness of God, it is foolish to believe that human beings are exempt from biological classification and the laws of evolution that apply to all other life forms.

The former conviction that these two kingdoms were wholly different in structure, in function, and in kind of life, was not seriously disturbed by the difficulties which the naturalist encountered when he undertook to define them.

If you ask most atheists if the theory of evolution has anything to do with a belief, however, they will tell you that it doesn't. It's not something that has to be believed. It is a 'fact.'

Fresh knowledge leads to recognition of the theory of evolution as more than just a hypothesis.

Every creature that lives climbs up its own genealogical tree before it reaches its mature condition. All animals living, or that ever have lived, are united together by blood relationship of varying nearness or remoteness, and every animal now in existence has a pedigree stretching back, not merely for ten or a hundred generations, but through all geologic time since life first commenced on the earth.

The Theory of Evolution has been proved true

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

I can handle heckling on evolution because it's my own field.

I'm a Darwinian.

Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun.

Darwin has interested us in the history of nature's technology.

Charles Darwin viewed the fossil record more as an embarrassment than as an aid to his theory.

Evolution is the most popular way we have for dealing with change.

In nature we find not only that which is expedient, but also everything which is not so inexpedient as to endanger the existence of the species.

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