Terry Tempest Williams Quotes

Most species do their own evolving, making it up as they go along, which is the way Nature intended.

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.

The story of evolution unfolds with increasing levels of abstraction.

Evolution is so creative. That's how we got giraffes.

Most species do their own evolving, making it up as they go along, which is the way Nature intended. And this is all very natural and organic and in tune with mysterious cycles of the cosmos, which believes that there's nothing like millions of years of really frustrating trial and error to give a species moral fiber and, in some cases, backbone.

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 tree of life was always there. Evolution just fills in the gaps.

The fossil record implies trial and error, an inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with an efficient Great Designer (although not with a Designer of a more remote and indirect temperament)

The essence of Darwinism lies in its claim that natural selection creates the fit. Variation is ubiquitous and random in direction. It supplies raw material only. Natural selection directs the course of evolutionary change.

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 has been observed. It's just that it hasn't been observed while it's happening.

Darwin has interested us in the history of nature's technology.

It was Darwin's chief contribution, not only to Biology but to the whole of natural science, to have brought to light a process by which contingencies a priori improbable, are given, in the process of time, an increasing probability, until it is their non-occurrence rather than their occurrence which becomes highly improbable.

Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is the only workable explanation that has ever been proposed for the remarkable fact of our own existence, indeed the existence of all life wherever it may turn up in the universe.

The secrets of evolution are death and time-the deaths of enormous numbers of lifeforms that were imperfectly adapted to the environment; and time for a long succession of small mutations.

Evolution is a mistake. Humans are a mistake. We've destroyed our planet.

I am an enthusiastic Darwinian, but I think Darwinism is too big a theory to be confined to the narrow context of the gene.

Evolution is not truth; it is merely a hypothesis-it is millions of guesses strung together.

Species evolve exactly as if they were adapting as best they could to a changing world, and not at all as if they were moving toward a set goal.

Optimization hinders evolution.

Evolution happens. There's no football team in the world that has stayed together for time ever more.

I mean, in a way, I feel that one of the reasons for learning about Darwinian evolution is as an object lesson in how not to set up our values and social lives.

One of the great breakthroughs of evolution theory is that you start with simple things and they will grow into complexity.

There's nothing nonsensical about saying that what would evolve if Darwinian selection has its head is something that you don't want to happen. And I could easily imagine trying to go against Darwinism.