Robert N. Bellah Quotes

We're supposed to keep evolving. Evolution did not end with us growing opposable thumbs. You do know that, right?

I live on the other side of Charles Darwin and I can no longer see human light as having been created perfect and falling into sin, I see us rather emerging into higher and higher levels of consciousness and higher and higher levels of complication.

We are the product of 4.5 billion years of fortuitous, slow biological evolution. There is no reason to think that the evolutionary process has stopped. Man is a transitional animal. He is not the climax of creation.

Evolution is the phenomenon of change and the challenge of the next time cycle will involve the creation of constructs that will provide the kind of dynamic knowledge base that can assist the challenges of tomorrow (involving both fundamental and extended information).

The main conclusion here arrived at ... is that man is descended from some less highly organized form.

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

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.

A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known.

Change in my work happens not in revolutions - it's more evolutionary.

With evolution, things are always changing, so I sort of think: Should we all be growing three heads?

The world has always gone through periods of madness so as to advance a bit on the road to reason.

Humans are mutants, everything's a mutant - things that evolve.

You don't just magically flip some evolutionary switch somewhere and transmute a quadruped into an upright-walking bipedal human.

I am fascinated by the human body and all its evolutions.

You can graph human evolution, which is mostly a straight line, but we do get better and change over time, and you can graph technological evolution, which is a line that's going straight up. They are going to intersect each other at some point, and that's happening now.

The progress of evolution, from President Washington to President Grant, was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin.... Grant should have lived in a cave and worn skins.

the day the asteroid hit the Yucatan Peninsula and wiped out the dinosaurs, making room for our little primate ancestors to grow big and brainy and to take over the planet.

It is impossible to understand change without context.

Humans are just a very, very small part of the panoply of life, and it is arguable that in a certain sense, humans have emancipated themselves from Darwinian selection.

Modifying ourselves is a natural process because we are a product of nature and what we do is a product of nature. Therefore, if one day we have three time bigger brain and two hearts instead of one (because one is not enough) then this is all part of nature.

The whole [scientific] process resembles biological evolution. A problem is like an ecological niche, and a theory is like a gene or a species which is being tested for viability in that niche.

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.

The story of evolution unfolds with increasing levels of abstraction.

Evolution of mankind is paralleled by the increase and expansion of consciousness.