George Wald Quotes

If the means were available, we could trace our ancestry - yours and mine - back to the first blob of life-like material that came into being on the planet.

Evolution is one of the two or three most primally fascinating subjects in all the sciences.

And, you know, the fact is, if you believe in evolution, we all have a common ancestor, and we all have a common ancestry with the plant in the lobby. This is what evolution tells us. And, it's true. It's kind of unbelievable.

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.

When I was about ten, I discovered evolution by reading a book by Wilhelm Boelsche and seeing a picture of Archaeopteryx.

Ninety-nine percent of all species that ever lived are now extinct.

Man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits.

The cell, over the billions of years of her life, has covered the earth many times with her substance, found ways to control herself and her environment, and insure her survival.

People say I am against Darwin. That is ridiculous.

Darwinism is not merely a support for naturalistic philosophy: it is a product of naturalistic philosophy.

The problem when arguing with those who believe in atheistic evolution is that they move goal posts by redefining atheism or evolution or the word 'species.'

I was brought up to understand Darwin's theory of evolution. I spent hours and hours in the Natural History Museum in London looking at the descriptions of how different kinds of animals had evolved, looking at the sequence of fossil bones looking gradually more and more and more and more like the modern fossil.

Life cannot arise spontaneously but comes only from preexisting life.

First, Darwinian theory tells us how a certain amount of diversity in life forms can develop once we have various types of complex living organisms already in existence.

To inquire into the origin of life is like seeking the origin of electrical machinery or the origin of music. Every increase in complexity of arrangement, of form, of substance, leads to new and often incalculable properties.

The first and most important reason for its elimination is the unquestioned fact that evolution is not a science; it is a hypothesis only, a speculation.

Sadly, I have found that even evolution's most staunch believers are afraid to debate, because they know that their case for atheism and evolution is less than extremely weak.

Indeed, if our ancestors of millions of years ago hadn't learned how to care for one another and hunt in packs, they'd all have ended up being eaten by leopards.

I think Darwinism as a theory explaining evolution within species is incredibly brilliant - just unbelievably, incredibly brilliant.

Whether conservative or liberal, fundamentalist or agnostic, the more students learn of biology, the more they accept evolution.

The impact of the magazine was very strong. As I said, it portrayed dinosaurs as part of the geological history, part of the story of life on earth. It struck that paleontology was the career for me.

I encourage people who don't believe in evolution to look for horses in Jurassic Solenhofen limestone.

All scientists agree that evolution has occurred - that all life comes from a common ancestry, that there has been extinction, and that new taxa, new biological groups, have arisen. The question is, is natural selection enough to explain evolution? Is it the driver of evolution?

Unfortunately, with dinosaurs, we haven't had enough specimens to determine how much variation there is within a species.

So in my freshman year at the University of Alabama, learning the literature on evolution, what was known about it biologically, just gradually transformed me by taking me out of literalism and increasingly into a more secular, scientific view of the world.