Compelling quotes about evolution from some of science’s big-hitters.
“Evolution is one of the half-dozen shattering ideas that science has developed to overturn past hopes and assumptions, and to enlighten our current thoughts.”
Stephen Jay Gould, 1941 – 2002
The Flamingo’s Smile: Reflections in Natural History, 1985
“For a biologist the alternative to thinking in evolutionary terms is not to think at all.”
Peter Medawar, 1915 – 1987
The Life Science, 1977
“The theory of evolution is quite rightly called the greatest unifying theory in biology.”
Ernst Mayr, 1904 – 2005
Populations, Species and Evolution, 1970
“Evolution is amazingly versatile in adapting the materials at hand to other uses.”
George Gaylord Simpson, 1902 – 1984
The Meaning of Evolution, 1967
“Believing as I do in evolution, I merely believe that it is the method by which God created, and is still creating, life on earth.”
Rachel Carson, 1907 – 1964
Letter to James Bennet, 1952
“Seeking to populate this otherwise sterile universe with living creatures, God chose the elegant mechanism of evolution to create microbes, plants, and animals of all sorts.”
Francis Collins, 1950 – present
The Language of God, 2006
“But if, before you die, you want to understand why you lived in the first place, Darwinism is the one subject that you must study.”
John Maynard Smith, 1920 – 2004
The Theory of Evolution, 1958
“Mendel and Darwin made the perfect couple. The sad thing is, of course, like most perfect couples they never met.”
Steve Jones, 1944 – present
BBC In Our Time, Genetics, Dec 13, 2001
“Nevertheless, I take it as now self-evident, requiring no further special discussion, that evolution and true religion are compatible.”
George Gaylord Simpson, 1902 – 1984
The Meaning of Evolution, 1967
“To give us room to explore the varieties of mind and body into which our genome can evolve, one planet is not enough.”
Freeman Dyson, 1923 – present
The Sun, The Genome, and The Internet, 1999
“Evolution, a fact rather than mere hypothesis, is the central unifying concept in biology. By extension it affects almost all other fields of knowledge and thought and must be considered one of the most influential concepts in Western thought.”
Douglas J. Futuyma, 1942 –
Evolutionary Biology, 1979
“The environment selects those few mutations that enhance survival, resulting in a series of slow transformations of one lifeform into another, the origin of a new species.”
Carl Sagan, 1934 – 1996
Cosmsos, 1980
“Mutation is random; natural selection is the very opposite of random.”
Richard Dawkins, 1941 – present
The Blind Watchmaker, 1986
“I suspect that some people also dislike the idea that natural selection has no foresight. The process itself, in effect, does not know where to go. It is the “environment” that provides the direction, and over the long run its effects are largely unpredicatable in detail.”
Francis Crick, 1916 – 2004
What Mad Pursuit, 1988
“We must therefore carefully distinguish between two quite different doctrines which Darwin popularised, the doctrine of evolution, and that of natural selection. It is quite possible to hold the first and not the second.”
J. B. S. Haldane, 1892 – 1964
The Causes of Evolution, 1932
“We cannot expect to explain cellular evolution if we stay locked into the classical Darwinian mode of thinking.”
Carl Woese, 1928 – 2012
On the Evolution of Cells, 2002
“Natural selection is the best studied of the evolutionary mechanisms, but biologists are open to other possibilities as well… Lynn Margulis and others have persuasively argued that some cellular organelles, such as the energy-generating mitochondria, evolved through the symbiotic merger of ancient organisms.”
John Rennie, 1959 – present
15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense, Scientific American, July 1, 2002
“From the paramecium to the human race, all life forms are meticulously organized, sophisticated aggregates of evolving microbial life. Far from leaving microorganisms behind on an evolutionary ‘ladder,’ we are both surrounded by them and composed of them.”
Lynn Margulis, 1938 – 2011
Microcosmos, 1997
“In the United States, more than half the population believes in a more or less literal reading of the Bible, and the overwhelming majority of people (including a large proportion of high school science teachers!) reject the idea that humans evolved from “lower” forms of animals and that Earth is billions of years old.”
Massimo Pigliucci, 1964 – present
Denying Evolution, 2002
“Humans are more like yeast than unlike it, because yeast and man have a common ancestor. Some of the ancestor’s progeny became yeasts and some became men, and those two journeys resulted in a change of only 43 nucleotides out of 312.”
George Wald, 1906 – 1997
Quoted in Genius, 1995
“Comparative parasitology supports the evolutionary hypothesis. If two animals have a common ancestor, their parasites are likely to be descended from those of the ancestor.”
J. B. S. Haldane, 1892 – 1964
The Causes of Evolution, 1932
“The strange thing about the theory of evolution is that everyone thinks he understands it. But we do not. A biosphere, or an econosphere, self-consistently coconstructs itself according to principles we do not yet fathom.”
Stuart Kauffman, 1939 – present
This Strange Illness, Jared Lobdell, 2004
“In our view the evolution of terrestrial life is controlled and directed by the continuing input of cometary debris in the form of bacteria, fragments of bacteria and smaller particles such as viruses and viroids. It is well known that viral genes sometimes come to be included in the genomes of multi-cellular lifeforms, and that such genes could serve as potential for futher evolution.”
Chandra Wickramasinghe, 1939 – present
Astronomical Origins of Life, 1999
“The evolution of a brain was a feat of fantastic difficulty — the most spectacular enterprise since the origin of life itself.”
Peter Medawar, 1915 – 1987
Reith Lectures, 1959
“Did the genome of our cave-dwelling predecessors contain a set or sets of genes which enable modern man to compose music of infinite complexity and write novels with profound meaning? …It looks as though the early Homo was already provided with the intellectual potential which was in great excess of what was needed to cope with the environment of his time.”
Susumu Ohno, 1928 – 2000
Evolution by Gene Duplication, 1970
“There is in evolution a continual balancing of the two advantages: the advantage of increasing specialization in sufficiently stable conditions, the advantage of versatility in changing conditions.”
George Gaylord Simpson, 1902 – 1984
The Meaning of Evolution, 1950
“Darwin does speculate about the adaptive advantage of giraffe’s necks, but he cites both natural selection and Lamarckism as probable causes of elongation.”
Stephen Jay Gould, 1941 – 2002
Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms, 1998
“Cultural evolution is Lamarckian and very fast, whereas biological evolution is Darwinian and usually very slow.”
E. O. Wilson, 1929 – present
On Human Nature, 1978
“Natural selection builds child brains with a tendency to believe whatever their parents and tribal elders tell them. Such trusting obedience is valuable for survival: the analogue of steering by the moon for a moth. But the flip side of trusting obedience is slavish gullibility.”
Richard Dawkins, 1941 – present
The God Delusion, 2006
“It’s very clear that there is evolution, and it’s important. Evolution is here, and intelligent design is here, and they’re both consistent.”
Charles Townes, 1915 – 2015
Interview UC Berkeley News, 2005
“Intelligent design is not a testable theory in any sense and as such it is not accepted by the scientific community.”
Kenneth R. Miller, 1948 – present
Kitzmiller v. Dover Court Case September 26, 2005
“Although Nature needs thousands or millions of years to create a new species, man needs only a few dozen years to destroy one.”
Victor Scheffer, 1906 – 2011
Spires of Form, 1983
“De-extinction is perhaps better imagined as an elaborate bioengineering project in which the biological end product is modeled on something that evolution created but that has unfortunately been lost.”
Beth Shapiro, 1976 – present
How to Clone a Mammoth, 2015
“…the future of life depends not only in our ability to understand and use DNA, but also, perhaps in creating new synthetic life forms, that is, life which is forged not by Darwinian evolution but created by human intelligence.”
Craig Venter, 1946 – present
Richard Dimbleby Lecture, 2007
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Dear author Doc of this site.I congratulate for your site, it is quite thought provoking in right direction of the truth.
I am professor emeritus of machine element design.
Now I am having metaphysical and theological discussions with some colleagues and even bishops,Bishops dont much like to discuss anything. I ask for your kind permission to include some excerpts of your excellent data into these discussions HM Finland.Best Regards
Yes, of course. Good Luck!