Evolution Quotes

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.

How have all those exquisite adaptations of one part of the organisation to another part, and to the conditions of life, and of one organic being to another being, been perfected?

Species that struggle to adapt to survive will become extinct.

It is not that these countries, so rich in species, do not by a strange chance possess the aboriginal stocks of any useful plants, but that the native plants have not been improved by continued selection up to a standard of perfection comparable with that given to the plants in countries anciently civilised.

In the eyes of most naturalists, the structure of the embryo is even more important for classification than that of the adult. For the embryo is the animal in its less modified state; and in so far it reveals the structure of its progenitor.

With mankind some expressions, such as the bristling of the hair under the influence of extreme terror, or the uncovering of the teeth under that of furious rage, can hardly be understood, except on the belief that man once existed in a much lower and animal-like condition.

The young and the old of widely different races, both with man and animals, express the same state of mind by the same movements.

It is mere rubbish thinking, at present, of origin of life; one might as well think of origin of matter.

Mere chance ... alone would never account for so habitual and large an amount of difference as that between varieties of the same species.

From the first dawn of life, all organic beings are found to resemble each other in descending degrees, so that they can be classed in groups under groups. This classification is evidently not arbitrary like the grouping of stars in constellations.

Nothing can be more hopeless than to attempt to explain this similarity of pattern in members of the same class, by utility or by the doctrine of final causes.