David Attenborough Quotes

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 theory of evolution is quite rightly called the greatest unifying theory in biology. The diversity of organisms, similarities and differ- ences between kinds of organisms, patterns of distribution and behavior, adaptation and interaction, all this was merely a bewildering chaos of facts until given meaning by the evolutionary theory.

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.

I encourage people who don't believe in evolution to look for horses in Jurassic Solenhofen limestone.

All scientists agree that evolution has occurred - that all life comes from a common ancestry, that there has been extinction, and that new taxa, new biological groups, have arisen. The question is, is natural selection enough to explain evolution? Is it the driver of evolution?

My own field of paleontology has strongly challenged the Darwinian premise that life's major transformations can be explained by adding up, through the immensity of geological time, the successive tiny changes produced generation after generation by natural selection.

… no truly helpful discovery has come from evolution …. if evolution were really a theory of everything, as they claim, then it ought to be obvious; they shouldn’t have to rely on silly evolutionary stories to make us believe it. Face it, evolution is unbelievable because it is simply not true. Most people are not gullible enough to think that a frog can change into a prince. Creation is a much better answer and we learn that when we go back to Genesis.

If one gains an interest in the history of the earth, he is quite sure to gain an interest in the history of the life on the earth. If the former illustrates the theory of development, so must the latter. The geologist is pretty sure to be an evolutionist.

Our young people - and adults - should be aware that considerable dissent exists in the scientific world regarding the validity of molecules-to-man evolution.

We know evolution happened because innumerable bits of data from myriad fields of science conjoin to paint a rich portrait of life's pilgrimage.

There is no controversy within science over the core proposition of evolutionary theory.

I think that many of my ideas are correct, but I'll bet you, before my death other discoveries will be made that will prompt me to alter various ideas I have about human evolution.

Evolution isn't true, because if we evolved from monkeys, how can they still be here?

What we should be teaching are the problems and holes and I think there are legitimate problems and holes in the theory of evolution. And what we need to do is to present those fairly from a scientific point of view. And we should lay out areas in which the evidence supports evolution and the areas in the evidence that does not.

The study of evolution is an evolution in itself.

Darwin recognized the fact that paleontology then seemed to provide evidence against rather for evolution in general or the gradual origin of taxonomic categories in particular.

Every paleontologist knows that most new species, genera, and families, and that nearly all categories above the level of family appear in the record suddenly and are not led up to by known, gradual, completely continuous transitional sequences.

Evolution is a theory, and it's a theory that you can test. We've tested evolution in many ways. You can't present good evidence that says evolution is not a fact.

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

A creationist can embarrass an evolutionist by asking for a definition of species.

It seems to me that for Darwin the pulsing of evolutionary rates was a strictly vertical phenomenon.

As you know, the fossil record includes not only the ancestors of crocodiles and whales, but also the ancestors of human beings. And this, of course, is why evolution remains controversial.

On the ordinary view of each species having been independently created, we gain no scientific explanation.

The existence of common features in different forms of life indicates some relationship between the different organisms, and according to the concept of evolution, these relations stem from the circumstance that the higher organisms, in the course of millions of years, have gradually evolved from simpler ones.

According to the concept of transformational evolution, first clearly articulated by Lamarck, evolution consists of the gradual transformation of organisms from one condition of existence to another.