Darwin Quotes - page 8
The realization that our mental functioning is largely irrational was arrived at by several thinkers at the same time, including Friedrich Nietzsche... Freud, who was much influenced by both Darwin and Nietzsche... was its most profound and articulate exponent. ...Schnitzler, Klimt, Kokoschka, and Schiele also discovered and explored new aspects of our unconscious mental life. They understood women better than Freud... and they saw more clearly than Freud the importance of an infant's bonding to its mother. They even realized the significance of the aggressive instinct earlier than Freud did. ...Plato discussed unconscious knowledge ...pointing out that much of our knowledge is inherent in the psyche in latent form. ...Hermann von Helmholtz... advanced the idea that the unconscious plays a critical role in human visual perception.
Eric Kandel
These arguments led Darwin to his denial of progress as a consequence of the "bare bones mechanics” of natural selection-for this process yields only local adaptation, often exquisite to be sure, but not universally advancing. The mammoth is every bit as good as an elephant-and vice versa. Do you prefer a marlin for its excellent spike; a flounder for its superb camouflage; an anglerfish for its peculiar "lure” evolved at the end of its own dorsal fin ray; a seahorse for its wondrous shape, so well adapted for bobbing around its habitat? Could any of these fishes be judged "better” or "more progressive” than any other? The question makes no sense. Natural selection can forge only local adaptation-wondrously intricate in some cases, but always local and not a step in a series of general progress or complexification.
Stephen Jay Gould
Reproduction, Nerissa thought: Ethan had once called it the blade of evolution. There was no intelligence in evolution, only the cutting-board logic of selective reproduction. She envisioned the work of evolution as a kind of blind, inarticulate poetry. We are the was it Charles Darwin had said? From so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved...There is grandeur in this view of life.
Grandeur or horror. The idea that all the kaleidoscopic strangeness of biological systems could unfold without guidance or motivation was almost too unsettling to accept.
Robert Charles Wilson
...Jews seem to have superiority as actors, chess-players, doctors, merchants (chiefly financiers), in metaphysics, music, poetry, and philology.... Of course, Jews have no Darwin. It took England 180 years after Newton before she could produce a Darwin, and as Britishers are five times the number of Jews, even including those of Russia, it would take, on the same showing, 900 years before they produce another Spinoza, or, even supposing the double superiority to be true, 450 years would be needed.
Baruch Spinoza
If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a nonworking cat. Life is a level of complexity that almost lies outside our vision; it is so far beyond anything we have any means of understanding that we just think of it as a different class of object, a different class of matter; 'life', something that had a mysterious essence about it, was God given, and that's the only explanation we had. The bombshell comes in 1859 when Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species. It takes a long time before we really get to grips with this and begin to understand it, because not only does it seem incredible and thoroughly demeaning to us, but it's yet another shock to our system to discover that not only are we not the centre of the Universe and we're not made by anything, but we started out as some kind of slime and got to where we are via being a monkey. It just doesn't read well.
Douglas Adams
Living organisms had existed on earth, without ever knowing why, for over three thousand million years before the truth finally dawned on one of them. His name was Charles Darwin. To be fair, others had had inklings of the truth, but it was Darwin who first put together a coherent and tenable account of why we exist.
Richard Dawkins
This century will be called Darwin's century. He was one of the greatest men who ever touched this globe. He has explained more of the phenomena of life than all of the religious teachers. Write the name of Charles Darwin on the one hand and the name of every theologian who ever lived on the other, and from that name has come more light to the world than from all of those.
Robert G. Ingersoll
We are closer to understanding ourselves and our environment than we were two centuries or two thousand years ago, so we are definitely more equipped with knowledge and information than the Buddha was, or even Darwin was. Darwin didn't know about DNA, we know about DNA. Just imagine if we could go back in time and inform Darwin about DNA or inform Buddha about it. What they were dealing with was intuition, with a logical breakdown of what they had observed. We have scientific tools for those things. We are using the energies of the past to create something new and I'm very confident that what I've done has never been done before. I feel no pressure about it, I'm just taking the next step.
Anand Gandhi
"What Darwin said was only a theory. There is no book saying ‘the Fact of Evolution' – All the books say ‘Theory of Evolution'," he said. "There is not a single statement in the Holy Qur'an, which Science has proved wrong yet. Hypothesis go against the Qur'an – theories go against the Qur'an. There is not a single scientific fact, which is mentioned in the Holy Qur'an which goes against established science – It may go against theory," Naik said.
Zakir Naik
I'm amused that Darwin, at whom I've been taking another look, should say that he also applies the ‘Malthusian' theory to plants and animals, as though in Mr Malthus's case the whole thing didn't lie in its not being applied to plants and animals, but only - with its geometric progression - to humans as against plants and animals. It is remarkable how Darwin rediscovers, among the beasts and plants, the society of England with its division of labour, competition, opening up of new markets, ‘inventions' and Malthusian ‘struggle for existence'. It is Hobbes' bellum omnium contra omnes and is reminiscent of Hegel's Phenomenology, in which civil society figures as an ‘intellectual animal kingdom', whereas, in Darwin, the animal kingdom figures as civil society.
Karl Marx
This means-and religious people might find this a useful argument-that there was only one creation, one single event when life was born. Of course, that life might have been born on a different planet and seeded here by spacecraft, or there might even have been thousands of kinds of life at first, but only Luca survived in the ruthless free-for-all of the primeval soup. But until the genetic code was cracked in the 1960s, we did not know what we now know: that all life is one; seaweed is your distant cousin and anthrax one of your advanced relatives. The unity of life is an empirical fact. Erasmus Darwin was outrageously close to the mark: ‘One and the same kind of living filaments has been the cause of all organic life.'
Matt Ridley
