organic evolution Quotes

For the lower races everywhere (leaving out slavery) there is eventually but one of two alternatives--viz., either extermination or mixture. But if mixture makes a feeble race, then this also is only a slower process of extermination. Is extermination, then, the inexorable fate of all the lower races? Shall the pitiless law of organic evolution-the law of destruction of the weak and the survival of only the strongest races-be the law of human evolution also? It may indeed be so, but let us hope not. It may be that there is a way of escape.

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

The earth's crust has not yet stopped heaving and plunging under our feet. Mountain ranges are still being thrust up on the horizon. Granites are still growing under the continental masses. Nor has the organic world ceased to produce new buds at the tips of its countless branches.

As far as I'm concerned, if there is a supreme being then He chose organic evolution as a way of bringing into existence the natural world... which doesn't seem to me to be necessarily blasphemous at all.

Throughout the kingdom of life, plant as well as animal, the overproduction of individuals and their reduction by death to a fractional part of the original number is one of the basic conditions of progress, if Darwinism is a sound explanation of organic evolution. For this death will be in the nature of things selective, and hence will make for the modification of the species toward a condition of better adaptation to conditions of life. Indeed, the upholders of war have used precisely the argument of war's high mortality as a proof of war's real beneficence to the race.

The stuff that I learned on 'Sons,' the education of how to tell stories, was part of that mythology. It's hard to look at it and go, 'Oh, if I knew this, I would have done it this way,' because the fact is I like to think that all that sort of unraveled as it was supposed to.

When discussing organic evolution the only point of agreement seems to be: ‘It happened.’ Thereafter, there is little consensus, which at first sight must seem rather odd.

In attempting to explain geological phenomena, the bias has always been on the wrong side; there has always been a disposition to reason á priori on the extraordinary violence and suddenness of changes, both in the inorganic crust of the earth, and in organic types, instead of attempting strenuously to frame theories in accordance with the ordinary operations of nature.

A lot of what I do is about being in the moment and I think that's hard for people to get. I like it when things suddenly affect the painting. I mix up this red and it affects the whole painting or this little bit of white falls down there, and something changes the whole nature of the thing. The residue on what happens, that's what's in the paintings.

London was not designed for cars. Come to that, it wasn't designed for people. It just sort of happened. This created problems, and the solutions that were implemented became the next problems, five or ten or a hundred years down the line.

What the evolutionist believes, on the basis of a mass of what seems to him un-refuted and irrefutable scientific evidence, is that the plants and animals and man and woman were not created by some sudden supernatural treatment of clay and ribs, but that they have slowly and gradually come into existence through the orderly processes of Nature extending over much time. He sees a fine and awe-inspiring order throughout Nature, some of which can be discovered and, in a measure, understood. He sees in this order, this immense capacity for natural being and doing and becoming, a beauty and majesty in Nature which cannot be transcended in conception. In recognizing the creation of man as its supreme achievement, he sees no belittling of man, but a proof of the extraordinary potentialities of this natural order. In organic evolution he sees just what the name signifies, the unfolding of organized matter, the outrolling of the possibilities of life.

I find it far more awesome, wonderful, that creation; our appearance in the world; should be the culmination, or at least one of the latest products of 3,000 Million years of organic evolution, than a kind of country trick, taking a rib out of a man's side in a trance.

In the final analysis the hierarchic pattern is nothing like the straightforward witness for organic evolution that is commonly assumed. There are facets of the hierarchy which do not flow naturally from any sort of random undirected evolutionary process. If the hierarchy suggests any model of nature it is typology and not evolution. How much easier it would be to argue the case for evolution if all nature's divisions were blurred and indistinct, if the systema naturalae was largely made up of overlapping classes indicative of sequence and continuity.

I’m interested in something which is built up from within, rather than just extracted from without.

I do not plan any painting, but begin with layers of textures and colors. As I layer the colors, something is suggested to me from within, and that is how it evolves.

When you organize your work and look back at your entire production, it may feel like you're looking at a straight line, but in fact it's nothing like that. The work is very experimental and most of the time it develops like branches. I usually see a capillary, like a tree shape where there are... branches that sort of move because you're not tending to them.

We didn't invent the Grateful Dead, the crowd invented the Grateful Dead. We were just in line to see what was going to happen.

Lobbyists didn't descend from a spaceship. They evolved organically from the way we do business.

One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.

They blossomed, they did not talk about blossoming.

The green prehuman earth is the mystery we were chosen to solve, a guide to the birthplace of our spirit, but it is slipping away. The way back seems harder every year. If there is danger in the human trajectory, it is not so much in the survival of our own species as in the fulfillment of the ultimate irony of organic evolution: that in the instant of achieving self-understanding, through the mind of man, life has doomed its most beautiful creations. And thus humanity closes the door on its past.

May it not suffice for me to say ... that of course like every other man of intelligence and education I do believe in organic evolution. It surprises me that at this late date such questions should be raised.

With any half-hour comedy, it kind of takes on its own life and finds itself.

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

It wasn't slung together by a producer and a publisher. We decided we were going to take hold of our music and let it evolve organically.