Evolution Quotes

Natural selection rendered evolution scientifically intelligible: it was this more than anything else which convinced professional biologists like Sir Joseph Hooker, T. H. Huxley and Ernst Haeckel.

Though nature grants vast periods of time for the work of natural selection, she does not grant an indefinite period; for as all organic beings are striving, it may be said, to seize on each place in the economy of nature, if any one species does not become modified and improved in a corresponding degree with its competitors, it will soon be exterminated.

Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work.

Descent being on my view the hidden bond of connexion which naturalists have been seeking under the term of the natural system.

Why is thought being a secretion of brain, more wonderful than gravity a property of matter? It is our arrogance, our admiration of ourselves.

There is continuity between humans and other animals in their emotional lives; there are transitional stages among species, not large gaps; and the differences among many animals are differences in degree rather than in kind

Natural selection, also, leads to divergence of character; for more living beings can be supported on the same area the more they diverge in structure, habits, and constitution.

In monstrosities, the correlations between quite distinct parts are very curious; and many instances are given in Isidore Geoffroy St. Hilaire's great work on this subject.

That climate acts in main part indirectly by favouring other species, we clearly see in the prodigious number of plants which in our gardens can perfectly well endure our climate, but which never become naturalised, for they cannot compete with our native plants nor resist destruction by our native animals.

Variation under Domestication,' there are two factors: namely, the nature of the organism, and the nature of the conditions.

Hence it is quite credible that the presence of a feline animal in large numbers in a district might determine, through the intervention first of mice and then of bees, the frequency of certain flowers in that district!

There is grandeur in this view of life... [in which] endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

If numerous species, belonging to the same genera or families, have really started into life all at once, the fact would be fatal to the theory of descent with slow modification through natural selection.

I believe that animals have descended from at most only four or five progenitors, and plants from an equal or lesser number.

For no amount of exercise, or habit, or volition, in the utterly sterile members of a community could possibly affect the structure or instincts of the fertile members, which alone leave descendants. I am surprised that no one has advanced this demonstrative case of neuter insects, against the well-known doctrine of Lamarck.

If then we have under nature variability and a powerful agent always ready to act and select, why should we doubt that variations in any way useful to beings, under their excessively complex relations of life, would be preserved, accumulated, and inherited?

Whoever is led to believe that species are mutable will do good service by conscientiously expressing his conviction; for only thus can the load of prejudice by which this subject is overwhelmed be removed.

Embryology will reveal to us the structure, in some degree obscured, of the prototypes of each great class.

When we descend to details we can prove that no one species has changed; nor can we prove that the supposed changes are beneficial, which is the groundwork of the theory.

Species of the same genus would occasionally exhibit reversions to lost ancestral characters.