Quote collection
308 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualist accounts of evolution."
"Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview."
"Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups."
"Life began three and a half billion years ago, necessarily about as simple as it could be, because life arose spontaneously from the organic compounds in the primeval oceans."
"Misunderstanding of probability may be the greatest of all impediments to scientific literacy."
"Complex organisms cannot be construed as the sum of their genes, nor do genes alone build particular items of anatomy or behavior by themselves. Most genes influence several aspects of anatomy and behavior as they operate through complex interactions with other genes and their products, and with environmental factors both within and outside the developing organism. We fall into a deep error, not just a harmful oversimplification, when we speak of genes "for" particular items of anatomy or behavior."
"Antiessentialist thinking forces us to view the world differently. We must accept shadings and continua as fundamental. We lose criteria for judgment by comparison to some ideal: short people, retarded people, people of other beliefs, colors, and religions are people of full status."
"Facts do not 'speak for themselves'; they are read in the light of theory."
"Nature is what she is - amoral and persistent."
"We have become, by the power of a glorious evolutionary accident called intelligence, the stewards of life's continuity on earth. We did not ask for this role, but we cannot abjure it. We may not be suited to it, but here we are."
"The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question."
"The human mind delights in finding pattern—so much so that we often mistake coincidence or forced analogy for profound meaning. No other habit of thought lies so deeply within the soul of a small creature trying to make sense of a complex world not constructed for it."
"Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress."
"Humans arose ... as a fortuitous and contingent outcome of thousands of linked events, any one of which could have occurred differently and sent history on an alternative pathway that would not have led to consciousness."
"We must [it has been arued] go beyond reductionism to a holistic recognition that biology and culture interpenetrate in an inextricable manner."
"Human life is the result of a glorious evolutionary accident."
"Science is all those things which are confirmed to such a degree that it would be unreasonable to withhold one's provisional consent."
"Asian Homo erectus died without issue and does not enter our immediate ancestry (for we evolved from African populations); Neanderthal people were collateral cousins, perhaps already living in Europe while we emerged in Africa... In other words, we are an improbable and fragile entity, fortunately successful after precarious beginnings as a small population in Africa, not the predictable end result of a global tendency. We are a thing, an item of history, not an embodiment of general principles."
"Evolution is an inference from thousands of independent sources, the only conceptual structure that can make unified sense of all this disparate information."
"We must shed the old stereotype of anarchists as bearded bomb throwers furtively stalking about city streets at night."