“Desire for beauty will endure and undermine the desire for truth.” — Richard O. Prum Copy Share Image
Great is the power of steady misrepresentation; but the history of science shows that fortunately this power does not long endure. — Charles Darwin Copy Share Image
...we must be wary of granting too much power to natural selection by viewing all basic capacities of our brain as direct… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
The expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient. — Charles Darwin Copy Share Image
“But that's what happens in life. People find new friends and new sisters. It's called natural selection.” — Sophie Kinsella Copy Share Image
“If natural selection can create creationists it can manage a caterpillar with a face on its arse.” — Zane Stumpo Copy Share Image
Natural selection eliminates and maybe maintains, but it doesn't create. — Lynn Margulis Copy Share Image
Sympathy beyond the confines of man, that is, humanity to the lower animals, seems to be one of the latest moral acquisitions. — Charles Darwin Copy Share Image
Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability. — Ronald Fisher Copy Share Image
“The great value of the Darwinian evolutionary paradigm is the way it helps us understand how what once was "noise" (e.g., unselected-uncorrelated… — Terrence Deacon Copy Share Image
Natural Selection never made it come to pass, as a habit of nature, that an unsupported stone should move downwards rather than… — Chauncey Wright Copy Share Image
“Darwinism is not a theory of random chance. It is a theory of random mutation plus non-random cumulative natural selection. Why, I… — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
The millionaires are a product of natural selection ... the naturally selected agents of society for certain work. They get high wages… — William Graham Sumner Copy Share Image
Why do people believe that there are dangerous implications of the idea that the mind is a product of the brain, that… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
The rule of thumb based into the brain by natural selection would not have been, Be nice to your kin and be… — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
“The earliest form of natural selection was simply a selection of stable forms and a rejection of unstable ones. There is no… — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
“Evolution is all about turning "bugs" into "features", turning "noise" into "signal", and the fuzzy boundaries between these categories are not optional;… — Daniel C. Dennett Copy Share Image
There is economics in biology, nothing is free, everything has to be paid for, there are costs as well as benefits to… — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
That there is much suffering in the world no one disputes. Which is more likely, that pain and evil are the result… — Charles Darwin Copy Share Image
Owing to this struggle for life, any variation, however slight and from whatever cause proceeding, if it be in any degree profitable… — Charles Darwin Copy Share Image
I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe, and especially the nature of man, and to conclude that everything is… — Charles Darwin Copy Share Image
“If you believe, God is the supreme creator of everything, then God is also the one who gave you a brain. Use… — Abhijit Naskar Copy Share Image
As Stephen Jay Gould pointed out in Time, in no other Western country is the teaching of Evolution regarded as controversial. Throughout… — Katha Pollitt Copy Share Image
“If you want the shortest version of my answer to the question of why Buddhism is true, it's this: Because we are… — Robert Wright Copy Share Image
The traditional view of purpose says it comes from on high, from God, from the Creator. Darwin's idea of natural selection makes… — Daniel Dennett Copy Share Image
“I have a little urge to all the rational thinkers in the world, both scientists and non-scientists. Because of the fact that… — Abhijit Naskar Copy Share Image
“Long before there were effective treatments, physicians dispensed prognoses, hope, and, above all, meaning. When something terrible happens-and serious disease is always… — Randolph M. Nesse Copy Share Image
“Anselm must have been out of his mind to think that the question ‘Does God exist?’ is a question about a predicate.… — Jim Riva Copy Share Image
“All organisms vary. It is in the highest degree improbable that any given variety should have exactly the same relations to surrounding… — Thomas Henry Huxley Copy Share Image
“The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes… — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
“Darwinism met with such overwhelming success because it provided, on the basis of inheritance, the ideological weapons for race and well as… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
“Unfortunately, however, there is another serious catch. Theory dictates that such discoveries must occur at an increasingly accelerating pace; the time between… — Geoffrey West Copy Share Image
“If a group of atoms in the presence of energy falls into a stable pattern it will tend to stay that way.… — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
Natural selection is all about the differential success of rival DNA in getting itself transmitted vertically in the species archives. — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
I would give absolutely nothing for the theory of Natural Selection, if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent. — Charles Darwin Copy Share Image
By the cold Darwinian logic of natural selection, evolution codifies happenstance into strategy. — David Quammen Copy Share Image
