Natural Selection Quotes

Eurasia ended up with the most domesticated animal species in part because it's the world's largest land mass and offered the most wild species to begin with.

Adapt or Die

Theories of evolution must provide for the creative acts which brought such theories into existence.

Humans are an infant species, a mere 150,000 years old. But, armed with a massive brain, we've not only survived, we've used our wits to adapt to and flourish in habitats as varied as deserts, Arctic tundra, tropical rainforests, wetlands and high mountain ranges.

The urgency to mate persists in all people as in all other mammals because of the evolutionary drive to continue the species, the inborn imperative for genes to reproduce and hormonal differences that evolved over millions of years.

The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established. In past ages, the law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains. Then man's new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. As a result, we continue to keep alive and to breed the unfit.

The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of our charity.

What Darwinian theory shows us is that all human races are extremely close to each other. None of them is in any sense ancestral to any other; none of them is more primitive than any other. We are all modern races of exactly equal status, evolutionarily speaking.

Evolution is a fact. It is the best explanation of what is known from observations. It's a theory as powerful as the theory of gravity.

Freedom for the pike is death for the minnow.

Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up, it knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn't matter whether you're the lion or a gazelle-when the sun comes up, you'd better be running.

Those who want to live, let them fight, and those who do not want to fight in this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to live.

Human beings are so destructive. I sometimes think we're a kind of plague, that will scrub the earth clean. We destroy things so well that I sometimes think, maybe that's our function. Maybe every few eons, some animal comes along that kills off the rest of the world, clears the decks, and lets evolution proceed to its next phase.

Hit the Poles so hard that they despair of their life; I have full sympathy with their condition, but if we want to survive, we can only exterminate them; the wolf, too, cannot help having been created by God as he is, but people shoot him for it if they can.

It is unconstitutional to teach intelligent design as an alternative to evolution in a public school science classroom.

Struggle is the father of all things. It is not by the principles of humanity that man lives or is able to preserve himself above the animal world, but solely by means of the most brutal struggle.

Nature, red in tooth and claw.

This world… belongs to the strong, my friend! The ritual of our existence is based on the strong getting stronger by devouring the weak.

Storms make the oak grow deeper roots.

Intelligent design is a modest position theologically and philosophically. It attributes the complexity and diversity of life to intelligence, but does not identify that intelligence with the God of any religious faith or philosophical system.

We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.

Whether you understand they evolved over billions of years or believe that a God made them all one afternoon, please be kind to animals.

The weak and misbegotten shall perish: first principle of our brotherly love. And they shall be given every assistance.

It is not the strongest of the species that survives. Nor is it the most intelligent. It is the members of the species that are most adaptive to change.

Eventually we'll be able to sequence the human genome and replicate how nature did intelligence in a carbon-based system.