Ellsworth Huntington Quotes

With the advent of genetic engineering the time required for the evolution of new species may literally collapse.

Evolution usually occurs in response to a crisis situation, and we now are faced with such a crisis situation. This is why there is indeed an enormous acceleration in the awakening process of our species.

... many folks take them seriously because they just 'know' that evolution can never be seen in the immediate here and now. In fact, a precisely opposite situation prevails: biologists have documented a veritable glut of cases for rapid and eminently measurable evolution on timescales of years and decades.

Nature holds no brief for the human experiment; it must stand or fall by its results.

Rather than be afraid of evolution and try to stifle inquiry, people should revel in the joys of knowing and find a serenity and a joy in being a part the rest of life on Earth. Not apart from it, but a part of it.

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

You know what, evolution is a myth. ... Why aren't monkeys still evolving into humans?

I never yet heard of a useless thing that was not ground out of existence by evolution sooner or later. Did you? And pain gets needless.

If we can simply distinguish between the different successive stages of evolution, it is possible to see primeval events within the earthly events of the present.

It at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed.

In the process of natural selection, then, any device that can insert a higher proportion of certain genes into subsequent generations will come to characterize the species.

The mind has grown to its present state of consciousness as an acorn grows into an oak, or as saurians developed into mammals.

The long summer was over. For ages a tropical climate had prevailed over a great part of the earth, and animals whose home is now beneath the Equator roamed over the world from the far South to the very borders of the Arctics ... But their reign was over. A sudden intense winter, that was also to last for ages, fell upon our globe.

All change is change for the better. There is no such thing as "change for the worse." Change is the process of Life Itself, and that process could be called by the name 'evolution.' And evolution moves in only one direction: forward, and toward improvement.

We are the accidental result of an unplanned process ... the fragile result of an enormous concatenation of improbabilities, not the predictable product of any definite process.

I see the triumph of good over evil as a manifestation of the error-correcting process of evolution.

Evolution is a process that never stops. Baboons who fail to exhibit moral behavior do not survive; they wind up as meat for leopards.

Obviously it depends on how you define a word like "evolution," because of course we have been evolving - both biologically and culturally - in relation to the natural world for hundreds of thousands of years.

The whole story is about change. We are very lucky that the earth's history is recorded in fossilized remains. And we can see the changes. Unfortunately, there will always be gaps in our knowledge, but there is no doubt that we and everything living today has evolved.

If we want to sum up the theory of evolution by natural selection in two words, which have great relevance for all societies and businesses, we should simply remember: diversity works.

Social evolution may be the result of intention, but it rarely, if ever, produces the result intended.

When discussing organic evolution the only point of agreement seems to be: ‘It happened.’ Thereafter, there is little consensus, which at first sight must seem rather odd.

You are a side effect," Van Houten continued, "of an evolutionary process that cares little for individual lives. You are a failed experiment in mutation.

This preservation of favourable variations and the destruction of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest. Variations neither useful nor injurious would not be affected by natural selection and would be left a fluctuating element.

You show me a successful complex system, and I will show you a system that has evolved through trial and error.