Daniel Dennett Quotes

In October, 1838, … I happened to read for amusement Malthus on population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long continuous observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favorable variations would tend to be preserved and unfavorable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work

I'm here as a product of process of evolution, which doesn't make very many exceptions. And which rates life relatively cheaply.

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.

It was a shock to people of the nineteenth century when they discovered, from observations science had made, that many features of the biological world could be ascribed to the elegant principle of natural selection.

Life cannot arise spontaneously but comes only from preexisting life.

In nature, the emphasis is in what is rather than what ought to be.

Mr. Darwin contributes some striking and ingenious instances of the way in which the principle partially affects the chain, or rather network of life, even to the total obliteration of certain meshes.

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

Evolution has programmed our brains to find two things particularly interesting, and therefore memorable: jokes and sex - and especially, it seems, jokes about sex.

Mr. Darwin refers to the multitude of the individual of every species, which, from one cause or another, perish either before, or soon after attaining maturity.

Evolution is an indispensable component of any satisfying explanation of our psychology.

A major fault, for example, is the fact that, along with the materialist principle, Darwin introduced into his theory of evolution reactionary Malthusian ideas.

The laws of nature are structured so that we grow and change, and get to experience the full spectrum of biological existence.

All nature's creatures join to express nature's purpose. Somewhere in their mounting and mating, rutting and butting is the very secret of nature itself.

Darwin based his theory on generalizations that were strictly empirical. You can go out and see that organisms do vary, that variations are inherited, and that every organism is capable of increasing its numbers in sufficiently favorable circumstances.

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

Evan Mecham proves that Darwin was wrong.

Probably all organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed.

The Theory of Evolution has been proved true

Would it be too bold to imagine that, in the great length of time since the earth began to exist, perhaps millions of ages before the commencement of the history of mankind would it be too bold to imagine that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament, which the great First Cause endued with animality, with the power of acquiring new parts, attended with new propensities, directed by irritations, sensations, volitions and associations, and thus possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down these improvements by generation to its posterity, world without end!

If a single cell, under appropriate conditions, becomes a man in the space of a few years, there can surely be no difficulty in understanding how, under appropriate conditions, a cell may, in the course of untold millions of years, give origin to the human race.

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

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.

We should not live by Darwinian principles. But Darwin explains how we got here.

If death weren't around to 'finalize' the Darwinian process, we'd all still be amoebas.