Quotes & Sayings About Change Charles Darwin

I find in the domestic duck that the bones of the wing weigh less and the bones of the leg more, in proportion to the whole skeleton, than do the same bones in the wild duck; and this change may be safely attributed to the domestic duck flying much less, and walking more, than its wild parents. — Charles Darwin

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, not the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change. - Charles Darwin — Aleatha Romig

In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment. — Charles Darwin

The most powerful natural species are those that adapt to environmental change without losing their fundamental identity which gives them their competitive advantage. — Charles Darwin

As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form. — Charles Darwin

At last gleams of light have come, and I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable. Heaven forfend me from Lamarck nonsense of a 'tendency to progression', 'adaptations from the slow willing of animals', &c! But the conclusions I am led to are not widely different from his; though the means of change are wholly so. I think I have found out (here's presumption!) the simple way by which species become exquisitely adapted to various ends. — Charles Darwin

CONTRARY TO THE COMMON ASSUMPTION , Charles Darwin did not originate the idea of evolution. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the mere fact of evolution had been around for a long time, and most thinkers of the time were perfectly content to leave it at that. The absence of a theory to explain evolutionary change didn't trouble them, wasn't experienced as a pressure, as it was by Darwin. He knew there had to be some intelligible mechanism or dynamic that would account for it, and this is what he went looking for - with well-known results. In his Origin of Species, he wasn't announcing the fact of evolution, he was trying to make sense of that fact. — Daniel Quinn

We are always slow in admitting any great change of which we do not see the intermediate steps — Charles Darwin

Judging from the past, we may safely infer that not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity. — Charles Darwin

Marx called Darwin a plagiarist and Malthus a fraud. Now all Marxists are Malthusian Darwinists. — A.E. Samaan

Slow though the process of selection may be, if feeble man can do much by his power of artificial selection, I can see no limit to the amount of change to the beauty and infinite complexity of the coadaptations between all organic beings, one with another and with their physical conditions of life, which may be effected in the long course of time by nature's power of selection. — Charles Darwin

In a completely different era and domain, Charles Darwin hypothesized that the emergence of each new species was a gradual process, taking place through the slow transformation of existing species into their somewhat-modified offspring. Yet evidence for such continuous change was not only lacking back then but is scarce even today, having prompted Darwin to label it "the gravest objection [that] can be urged against my theory." Instead, over millions of years species in the fossil record show little or no evolutionary change. New species tend to appear over periods spanning tens of thousands of years, a split second in terms of all evolutionary time. Evolution proceeds in bursts, which are in turn preserved in the fossil record. — Albert-Laszlo Barabasi

Not one change of species into another is on record ... we cannot prove that a single species has been changed. — Charles Darwin

The world will not be inherited by the strongest, it will be inherited by those most able to change. — Charles Darwin

Very few, even among those who have taken the keenest interest in the progress of the revolution in natural knowledge set afoot by the publication of the 'Origin of Species'; and who have watched, not without astonishment, the rapid and complete change which has been effected both inside and outside the boundaries of the scientific world in the attitude of men's minds towards the doctrines which are expounded in that great work, can have been prepared for the extraordinary manifestation of affectionate regard for the man, and of profound reverence for the philosopher, which followed the announcement, on Thursday last, of the death of Mr Darwin. — Thomas Henry Huxley

I want to do for every aspect of the human world a little bit of what Charles Darwin did for biology, and get you to see past the illusion of design, to see the emergent, unplanned, inexorable and beautiful process of change that lies underneath. — Matt Ridley