Charles Darwin Quotes

Sometimes things can take a very long time and still not be very good. It took us all of evolutionary history just to get where we are today, for instance, and mostly where we are today is on the couch.

Our animal origins are constantly lurking behind, even if they are filtered through complicated social evolution.

If we look into ourselves we discover propensities which declare that our intellects have arisen from a lower form; could our minds be made visible we should find them tailed.

The human's place in the universe will be set in the scheme of evolution, the product of our biological inheritance.

It is hard for the ape to believe he descended from man.

Evolution isn't just a take-it-or-leave-it story about where we came from. It's an epic at the centre of life itself. It tells us we are part of nature in every respect.

It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.

When I think about life on Earth, there should not be a species like us. And if there was, we should be out in the jungle killing each other in small groups. That's what you should expect.

Man, as a physical being, is like other bodies governed by invariable laws.

Every creature that lives climbs up its own genealogical tree before it reaches its mature condition. All animals living, or that ever have lived, are united together by blood relationship of varying nearness or remoteness, and every animal now in existence has a pedigree stretching back, not merely for ten or a hundred generations, but through all geologic time since life first commenced on the earth.

Instead of holding on to the Biblical view that we are made in the image of God, we come to realize that we are made in the image of the monkey.

If there were no Adam and Eve and we’re all evolved from apelike ancestors and there’s homosexuality in the animal world and if Genesis is mythology, then you can justify any behavior you want.

I think almost everything about humans and human civilization is explained better by evolution than anything else.

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.

I think I was probably wondering, having looked at human beings for a long time, wondering if evolution ever took place. And I still have my doubts.

The creature called man has a strange history. He is not of one piece, nor was he born of a single moment in time. His elementary substance is stardust almost as old as the universe.

It now seems plain to me that that theory ought to be vacated in favor of a new and truer one...the Descent of Man from the Higher Animals.

Darwinian man, though well-behaved, at best is only a monkey shaved.

There was an idea that God created man different from other animals, because man was rational and animals had drives and instincts. That idea of a rational man that was specially created went out the window when Darwin showed that we evolved from animal ancestors, that we have instincts, much as do animals, and that our instincts are very important. It was a much more sophisticated, nuanced, and rich view of the human mind.

I have been scientifically studying the traits and dispositions of the "lower animals" (so-called) and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the result profoundly humiliating to me. For it obliges me to renounce my allegiance to the Darwinian theory of the Ascent of Man from the Lower Animals; since it now seems plain to me that that theory ought to be vacated in favor of a new and truer one, this new and truer one to be named the Descent of Man from the Higher Animals.

Basically we are chimpanzees with about two percent more intelligence and a little less hair.

Mr L Prosser was, as they say, only human. In other words he was a carbon-based life form descended from an ape. More specifically he was forty, fat and shabby and worked for the local council. Curiously enough, though he didn't know it, he was also a direct male-line descendant of Genghis Khan, though intervening generations and racial mixing had so juggled his genes that he had no discernible Mongoloid characteristics, and the only vestiges left in Mr L Prosser of his mighty ancestry were a pronounced stoutness about the tum and a predilection for little fur hats.

Where do we come from? What are We? Where are we going?

With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. Hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

There never was a time when we were created perfect and fell into sin and needed to be rescued. We are evolving people; we are not fallen people. We are not a little lower than the angels. We're a little higher than the apes. It's a very different perspective.