Theodosius Dobzhansky Quotes

19 quotes in 395 categories

• Nature's stern discipline enjoins mutual help at least as often as warfare. The fittest may also be the gentlest.
• The foundations of population genetics were laid chiefly by mathematical deduction from basic premises contained in the works of Mendel and Morgan and their followers.…
• Scientists often have a naive faith that if only they could discover enough facts about a problem, these facts would somehow arrange themselves in a…
• Seen in retrospect, evolution as a whole doubtless had a general direction, from simple to complex, from dependence on to relative independence of the environment,…
• The more we know, the better we realize that our knowledge is a little island in the midst of an ocean of ignorance.
• Man is the only living being who has a developed self-awareness and death-awareness.
• No known human group... simply throw out its dead without any ritual or ceremony. In stark contrast, no animal practices burial of dead individuals of…
• The living world is not a single array... connected by unbroken series of intergrades.
• Seen in the light of evolution, biology is, perhaps, intellectually the most satisfying and inspiring science. Without that light it becomes a pile of sundry…
• An accident, a random change, in any delicate mechanism can hardly be expected to improve it. Poking a stick into the machinery of one's watch…
• Natural selection must be replaced by eugenical artificial selection. This idea constitutes the sound core of eugenics, the applied science of human betterment.
• Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.
• Does the evolutionary doctrine clash with religious faith? It does not. It is a blunder to mistake the Holy Scriptures for elementary textbooks of astronomy,…
• Evolutionary plasticity can be purchased only at the ruthlessly dear price of continuously sacrificing some individuals to death from unfavourable mutations. Bemoaning this imperfection of…
• I am a creationist and an evolutionist. Evolution is God's, or Nature's method of creation. Creation is not an event that happened in 4004 BC;…
• No evidence is powerful enough to force acceptance of a conclusion that is emotionally distasteful.
• Evolution as a process that has always gone on in the history of the earth can only be doubted by those who are ignorant of…
• Marxists are more right than wrong when they argue that the problems scientists take up,. the way they go about solving them, and even the…

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