It-was a tiny mollusc that caused Walter, grandfather of the greatest biologist of the twentieth century, to forge a brief link with the greatest biologist of the nineteenth: Charles Darwin. . . . . . We know this because later that day he wrote hesitantly to Darwin to report what he had found.
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To shoot a man because one disagrees with his interpretation of Darwin or Hegel is a sinister tribute to the supremacy of ideas in human affairs -- but a tribute nevertheless.
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My theory of evolution is that Darwin was adopted.
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Man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system- with all these exalted powers- Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.
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There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties.... The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind. We have seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention and curiosity, imitation, reason, etc., of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes a well-developed condition, in the lower animals.
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It is curious how there seems to be an instinctive disgust in Man for his nearest ancestors and relations. If only Darwin could conscientiously have traced man back to the Elephant or the Lion or the Antelope, how much ridicule and prejudice would have been spared to the doctrine of Evolution.
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We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universes, to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act.
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An American Monkey after getting drunk on Brandy would never touch it again, and thus is much wiser than most men.
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Imagine a world without Darwin. Imagine a world in which Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace had not transformed our understanding of living things. What... would become baffling and puzzling..., in urgent need of explanation? The answer is: practically everything about living things....
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A fool is a man who never tried an experiment in his life.
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Natural selection, the unconscious, automatic, blind yet essentially non-random process that Darwin discovered, has no purpose in mind. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker
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Throughout History, Empires have persecuted the great agitators; Noah, Socrates, Jesus, Columbus, Voltaire, Charles Darwin, Gandhi, the US Founding Fathers, Martin Luther King, Jr. et. al.
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The lower animals, like man, manifestly feel pleasure and pain, happiness and misery. Happiness is never better exhibited than by young animals, such as puppies, kittens, lambs, &c., when playing together, like our own children. Even insects play together, as has been described by that excellent observer, P. Huber, who saw ants chasing and pretending to bite each other, like so many puppies.
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If the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.
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I'd give Charles Darwin videotapes of 'Geraldo,' 'Beavis and Butt-head' and 'The McLaughlin Group.' I would be interested in seeing if he still believes in evolution.
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I love foolsÆ experiments. I am always making them
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It was at a particular moment in the history of my own rages that I saw the Western world conditioned by the images of Marx, Darwin and Freud; and Marx, Darwin and Freud are the three most crashing bores of the Western world. The simplistic popularization of their ideas has thrust our world into a mental straitjacket from which we can only escape by the most anarchic violence.
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We must, however, acknowledge as it seems to me, that a man with all his noble qualities...still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.
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The fact of evolution is the backbone of biology, and biology is thus in the peculiar position of being a science founded on an improved theory, is it then a science or faith? by
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Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
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A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.
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As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities
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You all know about the Darwin Awards -- It's an annual honor given to the person who did the gene pool the biggest service by killing themselves in the most extraordinarily stupid way. Last year's winner was the fellow who was killed by a Coke machine which toppled over on top of him while he was attempting to tip a free soda out of it.
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Nothing before had ever made me thoroughly realise, though I had read various scientific books, that science consists in grouping facts so that general laws or conclusions may be drawn from them
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It is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science
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I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection.
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False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for everyone takes a salutory pleasure in proving their falseness.
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The fact of evolution is the backbone of biology, and biology is thus in the peculiar position of being a science founded on an improved theory, is it then a science or faith?
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It is a cursed evil to any man to become as absorbed in any subject as I am in mine.
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Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowlege: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
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