Top 40 Darwin Quotes

For all the creationists out there, Darwin’s just an atheist. But he was actually agnostic.

Charles Darwin sailed around the world for two years on the ‘Beagle,’ and he had quite a bit of interest in things like the iguanas of the Galapagos, even though they were primitive compared to your average Englishman.

If Darwin’s theories are true, then we have within us the physical memory of when we were fish or apes.

The lives of those such as Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein are plainly of interest in their own right, as well as for the light they shed on the way these great scientists worked. But are ‘routine’ scientists as fascinating as their science? Here I have my doubts.

I was socially isolated as a kid. I had friends, but I wasn’t very good at sports and that sort of thing so I became quite comfortable being by myself, exploring. The world was my private playground, and in it, I was supreme. Darwin, Faraday, Huxley and other great scientists were my companions.

If you are teaching Muslim sixth formers in a school, and you tell them they can’t have their God and Darwin, there is a risk they will choose their God and be lost to science.

In arguing that machines think, we are in the same fix as Darwin when he argued that man shares common ancestors with monkeys, or Galileo when he argued that the Earth spins on its axis.

As an eight-year-old, I would listen to stories and biographies of Charles Darwin and Galileo. I also went to wonderful schools and had great teachers who inspired me.

I was brought up to understand Darwin’s theory of evolution. I spent hours and hours in the Natural History Museum in London looking at the descriptions of how different kinds of animals had evolved, looking at the sequence of fossil bones looking gradually more and more and more and more like the modern fossil.

Darwin talks about evolution, but he doesn’t say how it started. Maybe the sense of mystery will dissolve in the face of science, but I am not so sure. We are all described by the human genome, but it’s getting people nowhere.

In Darwin’s time all of biology was a black box: not only the cell, or the eye, or digestion, or immunity, but every biological structure and function because, ultimately, no one could explain how biological processes occurred.

I am one who believes that the world goes from the slime to the sublime. And you can take Darwin and all your philosophers and all your ontologists, and that’s the direction.

Biology has progressed tremendously due to the model that Darwin put forth. But the black boxes Darwin accepted are now being opened, and our view of the world is again being shaken.

But sequence comparisons simply can’t account for the development of complex biochemical systems any more than Darwin’s comparison of simple and complex eyes told him how vision worked.

I often think of the different ways Goethe and Darwin got at evolution. Goethe had the poetic conception of it all right; Darwin worked it out step by step. Who’s ahead? And which has any business scoffing at the other?

I’d love to meet Darwin. He caused such controversy over whether God created the earth in six days or whether we evolved over time. I’d love to discuss that with him – what a fantastic conversation!

Darwin himself, in his day, was unable to fight free of the theoretical errors of which he was guilty. It was the classics of Marxism that revealed those errors and pointed them out.

Every one of my positions cuts – out half the country. I’m pro-choice, I’m pro-gay rights, I’m pro-immigration, I’m against guns, I believe in Darwin.

Darwin investigated the numerous facts obtained by naturalists in living nature and analysed them through the prism of practical experience.

By the age of 11, I was no longer going to Sunday Mass, and going on birdwatching walks with my father. So early on, I heard of Charles Darwin. I guess, you know, he was the big hero. And, you know, you understand life as it now exists through evolution.

I live on the other side of Charles Darwin and I can no longer see human light as having been created perfect and falling into sin, I see us rather emerging into higher and higher levels of consciousness and higher and higher levels of complication.

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.

My theory of evolution is that Darwin was adopted.

Evolution was far more thrilling to me than the biblical account. Who would not rather be a rising ape than a falling angel? To my juvenile eyes, Darwin was proved true every day. It doesn’t take much to make us flip back into monkeys again.

When most of us hear the phrase, ‘survival of the fittest,’ we assume it originated with Charles Darwin. It did not. The phrase doesn’t exist anywhere in Darwin’s first edition of ‘Origin of the Species.’

Although Darwin was able to persuade much of the world that a modern eye could be produced gradually from a much simpler structure, he did not even attempt to explain how the simple light sensitive spot that was his starting point actually worked.

Charles Darwin got his theory, his notion of natural selection, evolution, and so did its independent discoverer, Alfred Wallace, from reading Malthus.

Agricultural practice served Darwin as the material basis for the elaboration of his theory of Evolution, which explained the natural causation of the adaptation we see in the structure of the organic world. That was a great advance in the knowledge of living nature.

As Darwin himself was at pains to point out, natural selection is all about differential survival within species, not between them.

America’s got a Darwin problem – and it matters. According to a 2009 Gallup poll taken on the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, fewer than 40% of Americans are willing to say that they ‘believe in evolution.’

If you hide information from people, don’t want people to see the Ten Commandments or don’t want people to hear about Darwin, aren’t we hiding things that we know from our future generations? I just think that that’s incorrect.

I didn’t know children were expected to have literary heroes, but I certainly had one, and I even identified with him at one time: Doctor Dolittle, whom I now half identify with the Charles Darwin of Beagle days.

As a citizen, as a public scientist, I can tell you that Einstein essentially overturned a so strongly established paradigm of science, whereas Darwin didn’t really overturn a science paradigm.

The classics of Marxism, while fully appreciating the significance of the Darwinian theory, pointed out the errors of which Darwin was guilty. Darwin’s theory, though unquestionably materialist in its main features, is not free from some serious errors.

Darwin’s idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition.

A major fault, for example, is the fact that, along with the materialist principle, Darwin introduced into his theory of evolution reactionary Malthusian ideas.

I am sure I was an evolutionist in the abstract, or by the quality and complexion of my mind, before I read Darwin, but to become an evolutionist in the concrete, and accept the doctrine of the animal origin of man, has not for me been an easy matter.

Darwinism as presented by Darwin contradicted idealistic philosophy, and this contradiction grew deeper with the development of its materialist teaching.

But, as we have before been led to remark, most of Mr. Darwin’s statements elude, by their vagueness and incompleteness, the test of Natural History facts.

Well, biology today as I see it has an amiable look – quite different from the 19th-century view that the whole arrangement of nature is hostile, ‘red in tooth and claw.’ That came about because people misread Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest.’