Darwin Quotes

No naturalist has devoted more painstaking attention to the structure of the barnacles than Mr. Darwin. (Richard Owen)
My theory of evolution is that Darwin was adopted. View quote
Steven Wright
Evolution, thus, is merely contingent on certain processes articulated by Darwin: variation and selection. No longer is a fixed object transformed, as in transformational evolution, but an entirely new start is, so to speak, made in every generation. View quote
Ernst Mayr
It is curious how there seems to be an instinctive disgust in Man for his nearest ancestors and relations. If only Darwin could conscientiously have traced man back to the Elephant or the Lion or the Antelope, how much ridicule and prejudice would have been spared to the doctrine of Evolution. View quote
Havelock Ellis
In one of my latest conversations with Darwin he expressed himself very gloomily on the future of humanity, on the ground that in our modern civilization natural selection had no play, and the fittest did not survive. Those who succeed in the race for wealth are by no means the best or the most intelligent, and it is notorious that our population is more largely renewed in each generation from the lower than from the middle and upper classes. View quote
Alfred Russel Wallace
We debase the richness of both nature and our own minds if we view the great pageant of our intellectual history as a compendium of new information leading from primal superstition to final exactitude. We know that the sun is hub of our little corner of the universe, and that ties of genealogy connect all living things on our planet, because these theories assemble and explain so much otherwise disparate and unrelated information-not because Galileo trained his telescope on the moons of Jupiter or because Darwin took a ride on a Galápagos tortoise. View quote
Stephen Jay Gould
I would trade all the advantages of humanity to be a fly on the wall when Franklin and Jefferson discussed liberty, Lenin and Trotsky revolution, Newton and Halley the shape of the universe, or when Darwin entertained Huxley and Lyell at Down. View quote
Stephen Jay Gould
The first objection to Darwinism is that it is only a guess and was never anything more. It is called a "hypothesis,” but the word "hypothesis,” though euphonioous, dignified and high-sounding, is merely a scientific synonym for the old-fashioned word "guess.” If Darwin had advanced his views as a guess they would not have survived for a year, but they have floated for half a century, buoyed up by the inflated word "hypothesis.” When it is understood that "hypothesis” means "guess,” people will inspect it more carefully before accepting it. View quote
William Jennings Bryan
Charles Darwin wrote a famous book in 18 [gibberish]. And that book was an interesting book, cuz it was called "Monkey-Monkey-Monkey-Monkey-Monkey-Monkey-You". View quote
Eddie Izzard
In private many scientists admit that science has no explanation for the beginning of life.. . . Darwin never imagined the exquisitely profound complexity that exists even at the most basic levels of life. View quote
Michael Behe
The result of [the] cumulative efforts to investigate the cell-to investigate life at the molecular level-is a loud, clear, piercing cry of ‘design!' The result is so unambiguous and so significant that it must be ranked as one of the greatest achievements in the history of science. The discovery rivals those of Newton and Einstein, Lavoisier and Schrödinger, Pasteur, and Darwin. The observation of the intelligent design of life is as momentous as the observation that the earth goes around the sun. (Michael Behe)
What Darwin was too polite to say, my friends, is that we came to rule the Earth not because we were the smartest, or even the meanest, but because we have always been the craziest, most murderous motherfuckers in the jungle. View quote
Stephen King
We now have many of the answers that once eluded Darwin, thanks to two developments that he could not have imagined: continental drift and molecular taxonomy. View quote
Jerry Coyne
You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being. Aristotle was an encyclopedic polymath, an all time intellect. Yet not only can you know more than him about the world, you also can have a deeper understanding of how everything works. Such is the privilege of living after Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Watson, Crick and their colleagues. View quote
Richard Dawkins
Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind's eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker. View quote
Richard Dawkins
To shoot a man because one disagrees with his interpretation of Darwin or Hegel is a sinister tribute to the supremacy of ideas in human affairs -- but a tribute nevertheless. View quote
George Steiner
I hope I may have succeeded in presenting to you, however imperfectly, the currents of thought due to the work of the immortal Darwin which have helped to make anthropology what it is at the present time. View quote
Franz Boas
I did some reading to prep for Expelled. I read one book cover to cover, From Darwin to Hitler, and that was a very interesting book - one of these rare books I wish had been even longer. It's about how Darwin 's theory - supposedly concocted by this mild-mannered saintly man, with a flowing white beard like Santa Claus - led to the murder of millions of innocent people. View quote
Ben Stein
There's no evidence whatsoever that Darwin had anything useful to say or anything to say period about how life began or how the universe began or how gravity began or how physics began or fluid motion or how thermodynamics began. He had nothing to say about that whatsoever. View quote
Ben Stein
And there hasn't been much progress in Darwinism since [the life of Darwin]. View quote
Ben Stein
Thank God for Darwin, eh? (Bill Bailey)
Much of the controversy and anxiety that has enveloped Darwin's idea ... can be understood as a series of failed campaigns to contain Darwin;s idea within some acceptably "safe" and merely partial revolution. Cede some or all of modern biology to Darwin, perhaps, but hold the line there! Keep Darwinian thinking out of cosmology, out of psychology, out of human culture, out of ethics, politics, and religion! In these campaigns, many battles have been won by the forces of containment: flawed applications of Darwin's idea have been exposed and discredited, beaten back by the champions of the pre-Darwinian tradition. But new waves of Darwinian thinking keep coming. View quote
Daniel Dennett
If you have Darwin, Christ and Nietzsche, they're all going to talk at once. You need somebody who listens. View quote
David Duchovny
A taxonomy of abilities, like a taxonomy anywhere else in science, is apt to strike a certain type of impatient student as a gratuitous orgy of pedantry. Doubtless, compulsions to intellectual tidiness express themselves prematurely at times, and excessively at others, but a good descriptive taxonomy, as Darwin found in developing his theory, and as Newton found in the work of Kepler, is the mother of laws and theories. View quote
Raymond Cattell
Darwin based his theory on generalizations that were strictly empirical. You can go out and see that organisms do vary, that variations are inherited, and that every organism is capable of increasing its numbers in sufficiently favorable circumstances. View quote
George C. Williams