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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James Watson’s 1968 book The Double Helix was highly controversial. Its unintended consequence was to revive the largely forgotten name of Rosalind Franklin.

We’ll never know Franklin’s views on her unflattering portrayal in The Double Helix – she died aged 37, 10 years before the book was published.

Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, who shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Medicine with Watson, were incensed by early drafts of the book they saw.

Watson wrote the book from his perspective as a young man – the book covers the time he was aged 23-25 years old – chasing one of the the twentieth century’s greatest discoveries. The book was gossipy; it was indiscreet; it was not deferential to older, eminent scientists; and it related inside information about Watson’s colleagues. No scientist had ever written anything like it before.

Crick got an early draft of the book and began corresponding with Watson about it in the spring of 1966. He sent Watson a long list of factual errors he’d found.

Maurice Wilkins, whose professional relationship with Rosalind Franklin had been disastrous, told Watson that he would not stand aside while she was discredited.

Finally, Crick threatened Watson with legal action for defamation if the book were published. He saw it as a huge invasion of privacy; he had always avoided personal publicity – he wouldn’t even allow his photo to be used in books.

The following month, Crick wrote Watson again. This time he said that if Watson invaded his privacy, he would reciprocate. To show what such an invasion would mean, Crick threatened to write a book entitled The Loose Screw. The first chapter would detail Watson’s personal deficiencies as seen by Crick, such as his speech impediment, juvenile handwriting, etc. He would send each chapter to Watson as he completed it. If Watson published his book, Crick would publish The Loose Screw. It’s likely Crick never intended writing these chapters – he was just trying to get over to his former colleague how personally hurt he felt by Watson’s book.

Crick and Wilkins sent letters of complaint to Harvard University Press, the book’s prospective publishers, claiming it would be unethical to publish a book that Watson’s closest collaborators objected to.

Watson made some edits in an attempt to mollify Crick and Wilkins, but would not back down: he was going to publish regardless of their objections.

In April 1967, Crick told Watson that the book was misleading, in bad taste, and a violation of friendship. History, he said, would condemn Watson for it.

In May 1967, Harvard University Press withdrew their offer to publish Watson’s book, saying to do so would go against their disputes policy regarding eminent scientists.

Watson, however, found another publisher – Atheneum.

Crick could not get the book stopped; and he also failed to persuade his boss, Sir Lawrence Bragg, not to write The Double Helix‘s preface.

The Double Helix was published in January 1968.

Erwin Chargaff, whose discovery of 1:1 ratios in DNA base pairs was one of the crucial clues leading to Watson and Crick’s discovery, reviewed The Double Helix for Science in March 1968.

Chargaff was hostile to molecular biology in general and to Watson and Crick in particular. One of his more memorable review lines was:

It is a great pity that the double helix was not discovered ten years earlier: some of the episodes could have been brought to the screen splendidly by the Marx Brothers.

He later described The Double Helix as ‘a shallow bestseller.’

Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize winning physicist, found Watson’s book inspiring. In Genius, James Gleick quotes a letter sent to Watson by an enthusiastic Feynman:

“The people who say ‘that is not how science is done’ are wrong… When you describe what went on in your head as the truth haltingly staggers upon you and passes on, finally fully recognized, you are describing how science is done. I know, for I have had the same beautiful and frightening experience.”

Twenty years later, when Crick penned his own autobiography, What Mad Pursuit, his attitude to Watson’s book had softened. Crick wrote:

“I now appreciate how skillful Jim was, not only in making the book read like a detective story… but also by managing to include a surprisingly large amount of science.”

The Double Helix has sold over a million copies.

50 years after Watson wrote it, it remains controversial.

Acknowledgements
A full and fair account of Rosalind Franklin’s life can be found in Brenda Maddox’s The Dark Lady of DNA.

Some of Crick’s correspondence is available at the Wellcome Library.