Henry Adams Quotes

Even when Darwin's teaching first made its appearance, it became clear at once that its scientific, materialist core, its teaching concerning the evolution of living nature, was antagonistic to the idealism that reigned in biology.

Evolutionary biologists are not content merely to explain how variation occurs within limits, however. They aspire to answer a much broader question-which is how complex organisms like birds, and flowers, and human beings came into existence in the first place.

Progressively thinking biologists, both in our country and abroad, saw in Darwinism the only right road to the further development of scientific biology.

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

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.

If evolution is outlawed, only outlaws will evolve.

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

Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.

Evolution is a bankrupt speculative philosophy, not a scientific fact.

I think of evolution as a myth, like the Norse myths, the Greek myths - anybody's myths. But it was created for a rational age.

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

Evolution is the idea some people have to explain life without God.

I am sure I was an evolutionist in the abstract, or by the quality and complexion of my mind, before I read Darwin, but to become an evolutionist in the concrete, and accept the doctrine of the animal origin of man, has not for me been an easy matter.

It seems to me that evolution adds greatly to the wonder of life because it takes it out of the realm of the arbitrary, the exceptional, and links it to the sequence of natural causation.

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.

A probing analysis of the problems of evolution forms the basis of my prose.

I have a strong feeling that the subject of evolution is beautiful without the excuse of creationists needing to be bashed.

The fact - not theory - that evolution has occurred and the Darwinian theory as to how it occurred have become so confused in popular opinion that the distinction must be stressed.

Essential to the theory of evolution is the premise that everything has come into being by itself.

Evolution thus is merely contingent on certain processes articulated by Darwin: variation and selection.

I was taught over and over again that the accumulation of random mutations led to evolutionary change - led to new species. I believed it until I looked for evidence.

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

We must also be permitted to bear in mind that evolution, though it may explain everything else, cannot explain itself.

As Darwin himself was at pains to point out, natural selection is all about differential survival within species, not between them.

You can't even begin to understand biology, you can't understand life, unless you understand what it's all there for, how it arose - and that means evolution.