Quotes & Sayings About Change Darwin

I have a feeling that if Darwin turns out to be right, the Christian faith won't fall apart after all. Faith is more resilient than that. Like a living organism, it has a remarkable ability to adapt to change. At our best, Christians embrace this quality, leaving enough space within orthodoxy for God to surprise us every now and then. At our worst, we kick and scream our way through each and every change, burning books and bridges and even people along the way. But if we can adjust to Galileo's universe, we can adjust to Darwin's biology - even the part about the monkeys. If there's one thing I know for sure, it's that faith can survive just about anything, so long as it's able to evolve. — Rachel Held Evans

Nowhere was Darwin able to point to one bona fide case of natural selection having actually generated evolutionary change in nature ... Ultimately, the Darwinian theory of evolution is no more nor less than the great cosmogenic myth of the twentieth century. — Michael Denton

Paleontologists had long been aware of a seeming contradiction between Darwin's postulate of gradualism, confirmed by the work of population genetics, and the actual findings of paleontology. Following phyletic lines through time seemed to reveal only minimal gradual changes but no clear evidence for any change of a species into a different genus or for the gradual origin of an evolutionary novelty. Anything truly novel always seemed to appear quite abruptly in the fossil record. — Ernst Mayr

Society in general maintains such a vested interested in its cozy habits and solidified belief systems that it had rather die - or kill - than entertain change. Consider how threatened religious fundamentalists of all faiths remain to this day by science in general and Darwin in particular. — Tom Robbins

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

I am a big believer of what Darwin discovered in the Galapagos, proving that the species most responsive to change will survive over apparently stronger or more intelligent competitors. — John Elkann

Darwin uneasily accepted that evolution might occasionally proceed a little faster than he had at first envisaged, but in general he simply dismissed Thompson's claim; although he could not disprove it, he remained stubbornly convinced that he was right. Darwin felt that evolution change, like Lyell's geological forces, must proceed at a respectable pace; apart from anything else, more rapid change hinted at supernatural, perhaps even divine, intervention in the Earth's history - approaches that increasingly had no place in properly philosophical explanations. — Jim Endersby

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

Darwin has done more to change human thought than all the priests who have existed. — Robert Green Ingersoll

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

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

LIFE CHANGES AHEAD? Darwin never said it was the strongest who survive; he never said it was the smartest either. He said it was the most adaptable. So, lets embrace our next life change with energy and euphoria. Lets make it positive and enlightening like never before. Carpe Diem — Lee Johnson

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

Intelligent design cannot explain Darwinian evolution. Darwin's whole point is that variation and change are random and without higher purpose. We cannot imagine that God designed this disproof of His own existence. — James K. Galbraith

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

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

Darwin's prediction of rampant, albeit gradual, change affecting all lineages through time is refuted. The record is there, and the record speaks for tremendous anatomical conservatism. Change in the manner Darwin expected is just not found in the fossil record. — Niles Eldredge

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

Darwinism is dynamic. It is about change, not stasis; about process, not pattern; about tales, not tableaux; about becoming, not being. — Henry Gee

The key word is flexibility, the ability to adapt constantly. Darwin said it clearly. People thought that he mainly talked about survival of the fittest. What he said was that the species that survive are usually not the smartest or the strongest, but the ones most responsive to change. So being attentive to customers and potential partners is my best advice
after, of course, perseverance and patience. — Philippe Kahn

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

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

So erst the Sage [Pythagoras] with scientific truth In Grecian temples taught the attentive youth; With ceaseless change how restless atoms pass From life to life, a transmigrating mass; How the same organs, which to-day compose The poisonous henbane, or the fragrant rose, May with to-morrow's sun new forms compile, Frown in the Hero, in the Beauty smile. Whence drew the enlighten'd Sage the moral plan, That man should ever be the friend of man; Should eye with tenderness all living forms, His brother-emmets, and his sister-worms. — Erasmus Darwin

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

It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change. — Leon C. Megginson

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

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

My grandfather had given me Mr. Darwin's book to read. He had given me the possibility of a different kind of life. but none of it mattered. Instead there was The Science of Housewifery for me. I was blind; I was pathetic. The century was about to change, but my own little life would not change with it. — Jacqueline Kelly

In Darwin's theory, you just have to substitute 'mutations' for his 'slight accidental variations' (just as quantum theory substitutes 'quantum jump' for 'continuous transfer of energy'). In all other respects little change was necessary in Darwin's theory ... — Erwin Schrodinger