Best 1587 quotes in «evolution quotes» category

We have repeatedly observed that while any whole is evolving, there is always going on an evolution of the parts into which it divides itself; but we have not observed that this equally holds of the totality of things, which is made up of parts within parts from the greatest down to the smallest.

We have reached a situation where a theory has been accepted as fact by some, and possible contrary evidence is shunted aside. [This is] mythology rather than science.

We have to understand ourselves as a part of the narrative of evolution. And evolution never stops. The notion that human evolution at some point stopped and "history" took over is absurd, though it is widespread among various social scientists and humanists.

We have vexed and bothered every plant and every animal on every continent.

We know evolution happened because innumerable bits of data from myriad fields of science conjoin to paint a rich portrait of life's pilgrimage.

We know from the truths of evolution and ecology that we are all related and interdependent. Anthropomorphism (crediting animals with human emotions and traits) is, however, outdated. Rather we know that we are like animals.

Well, the first thing is that truth and power for me form an antithesis, an antagonism, which will hardly ever be resolved. I can define in fact, can simplify the history of human society, the evolution of human society, as a contest between power and freedom.

We need to participate directly in the evolution of consciousness, which, at its core, is the evolution of love.

Wenn jemand sich in Inkarnation befindet, bietet ihm dieser Körper das Problem, das er erlernen muss oder (wenn die Evolution fortgeschritten ist) bietet den Träger, der sich für die Art der jeweiligen Aufgabe am besten eignet. Ein orientalischer Körpertyp hat eine gewisse Anzahl von Fähigkeiten, und ein abendländischer Körpertyp weist andere und, wenn ich so sagen darf, ebenso gute Eignungen auf.

We're not going to make Evolution or any of our other products depend on Mono anytime in the near future.

We're in the midst of an evolution, not a revolution.

We're going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones.

We take foreigners to be incomplete Americans -- convinced that we must help and hasten their evolution.

Whenever anything changes and quits its proper limits, this change is at once the death of that which was before.

What we usually call human evolution is the awakening of the divine nature within us.

What I like about the Pleiadians is that they work and meet each person where they are in their own evolution. Every initiation, every process, is designed for the individual to meet an aspect of where they are within themselves.

What is evolution if not creative adaptation and the progression of our own souls?

When biological technology becomes further advanced, human beings as we know them, will become a modified species. If we as human beings fail to include the possibility of this development in our overall, social evolution we will witness the decline of our species

Whenever conditions arise in which a new kind of replicator can make copies of itself, the new replicators will tend to take over, and start a new kind of evolution of their own. Once this new evolution begins, it will in no necessary sense be subservient to the old.

When evolution has been outlawed, only the outlaws will evolve.

When the dominant images of a culture are anticipatory, they "lead" social development and provide direction for social change.

When things get bad enough, then something happens to correct the course. And it's for that reason that I speak about evolution as an error-making and an error-correcting process. And if we can be ever so much better - ever so much slightly better - at error correcting than at error making, then we'll make it.

When we look at chimpanzees . . . we get this extremely fine-grained view of evolution, and as a result we understand a lot more about the processes that are changing our own genome over time.

Why didn't evolution make a giraffe good at carpentry so it could build a ladder?

When you walk in a beautiful road, you must know that you are walking on a miracle: The miracle of evolution!

Whoever authorized the evolution of the spiders of Australia should be summarily dragged out into the street and shot.

Whoever heard of a neurotic frog? Where do humans get off thinking they're the pinnacle of evolution?

Where there is age there is evolution, where there is life there is growth.

Wilberforce did not believe in either evolution or extinction. Owen believed in extinction but not evolution. Lamarck believed in evolution but not extinction. Darwin believed in evolution and extinction. All four of them believed in God.

Would it not be strange if a universe without purpose accidentally created humans who are so obsessed with purpose?

Words have a genealogy and it's easier to trace the evolution of a single word than the evolution of a language.

You have to look at history as an evolution of society.

You have to learn it all, then forget it and start again like a child. This is the inner evolution.

You have to evolve as an artist, and this is really a lifelong process.

You must learn to see the world as being produced by evolution; as a something which is evolving and becoming, not as a finished work.

Your brain has a music room, and evolution would not have gone to the trouble of designing that if it didn't have some benefits. So, that suggests to me that we and our ancestors have had music as a central part of our experience for eons. And we're just beginning to understand how that might be. I think that's fascinating.

Your creatures can come into being only, like shoot from stem, as part of an endlessly renewed process of evolution.

A balanced diet” is not so much about protein/fat/carbohydrate ratios. The real ratios to consider, at least for the typical American or European, are energy consumption/expenditure, pleasure/actual need, food/everything else.

Zweck sein selbst ist jegliches Tier. Each animal is an end in itself.

(About changing faith) At our best, Christians embrace it, leaving enough space within orthodoxy for God to surprise us every now and then.

Above all we should, in the century since Darwin, have come to know that man, while now captain of the adventuring ship, is hardly the sole object of its quest, and that his prior assumptions to this effect arose from the simple necessity of whistling in the dark.

About 4,400 years ago 8 people stepped off Noah’s ark. According to the United Nations Population Growth Statistics, the world’s population grows at about .47% per year. That is the growth rate for all civilizations who kept records. Suppose you put $8.00 in the bank 4,400 years ago and received .47% a year. How much money would you have? What a coincidence! It would be about $7,000,000,000. That’s kind of odd, because 4,400 years ago 8 people stepped off the ark and now we have about 7,000,000,000 people on planet earth. God’s math works! Compound interest is something we teach to seventh-graders. You don’t have to be a professor to figure this out. A twelve-year-old can do the calculation. Ask any seventh-grader, the algebraic equation looks like this: A=P (1+r/n)t . . . where "A " is the ending amount (about 7,000,000,000 in this case), "P " is the beginning amount (8 in this case), "r " is the interest rate (.47% in this case), "n " is the number of compoundings a year (1 in this case), and "t " is the total number of years (4,400 in this case). pg 11

Accurately perceiving and following one’s intuition is, I think, the essential human spiritual process. The distractions, confusion, misinterpretations and temptations that oppose that process are enormous. At the same time, there are always clues for how to go about it. The divine is a mystery, so the impulse to really discover, like a child, has to be the core response to anything; that’s the only way beyond the habits, presumptions and prejudices that feed ignorance and fear. To question well, instead of hiding behind a belief or answer, requires the application of the most valued of all human qualities, such as compassion, courage, imagination, respect, humility, devotion, and ultimately love of life itself. This kind of passionate questing is evident in the most admired and, if you will, divine individuals in every culture, religion, and skill throughout history.

According to Teleology, each organism is like a rifle bullet fired straight at a mark; according to Darwin, organisms are like grapeshot of which one hits something and the rest fall wide. For the teleologist an organism exists because it was made for the conditions in which it is found; for the Darwinian an organism exists because, out of many of its kind, it is the only one which has been able to persist in the conditions in which it is found. Teleology implies that the organs of every organism are perfect and cannot be improved; the Darwinian theory simply affirms that they work well enough to enable the organism to hold its own against such competitors as it has met with, but admits the possibility of indefinite improvement.

achievements. The world is directed towards the perceiver, it celebrates the ultimate perceiver. He who is established in the Self is in no way interested in theologies and cosmologies.

A clock that is moving through space at a very fast speed does not tick at the same rate as a slow-moving watch gently attached to your wrist as you stroll on a tropical beach. The idea of a universal time - a godlike clock that could somehow sit outside our universe and measure, in one go, the movement of everything in it, how its evolution unfolds, how old it is and all that - does not exist.

. . . [A] creationist spy named Luther Sunderland snuck into a closed scientific meeting of the Systematics Discussion Group at the American Museum in 1981 with a hidden tape recorder. . . . My friend, the distinguished paleoichthyologist Colin Patterson of the British Museum in London, was talking about pattern cladism and how he had abandoned many of the assumptions about evolution that he had once held, including the recognition of ancestors in the fossil record. He was now only interested in the simplest hypotheses that were easily tested, such as cladograms. But, of course, taken out of context, it sounds as though Colin doubted that evolution had taken place, yet he said nothing of the sort! Colin was speaking in a kind of "shorthand" that makes sense to the scientists who understand the subtleties of the debate, but mean something entirely different when taken out of context. I was at that meeting and was stunned to read afterward about Sunderland's account of what had happened because I remembered Colin's ideas clearly and could not imagine how they could be misinterpreted. For decades afterward, Colin had to explain over and over again what he had meant, and why he did not doubt the fact that evolution had occurred, only that he no longer accepted a lot of the other assumptions about evolution that Neo-Darwinists had made. Unfortunately, Colin died in 1998 while he was still in his scientific prime, unable to continue fighting these misinterpretations of his ideas that continue to be propagated by the creationists.

...action is in fact knowledge in operation. Right action stems from right knowledge. Right knowledge is acquired through the teacher.

According to Zen Buddhists, all things have their existence in The Void. The Void is that which is no-thing, but contains all things within it, or as some Christian mystics state, “God is Nothing; He is Utterly Other; He is the VOID.

A child is reliving millions of years of Evolution from a single cell to a XXI Century Human. This is the most amazing miracle I've ever encountered, and I am truly grateful to the Nature for letting me perform it - for letting me create a new life called Emily.