The Greatest Show On Earth: The Evidence For Evolution Quotes
"Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact."
"Descendants can depart indefinitely from the ancestral form, and each departure becomes a potential ancestor to future variants."
"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one."
"The more energetically and thoroughly you try to disprove a theory, if it survives the assault, the more closely it approaches what common sense happily calls a fact."
"The evidence for evolution is at least as strong as the evidence for the Holocaust, even allowing for eye witnesses to the Holocaust."
"Every animal is linked to every other animal, say rabbit to leopard, by a chain of intermediates, each so similar to the next that every link could in principle mate with its neighbours in the chain and produce fertile offspring."
"The theory of evolution is indeed a ‘scheme or system of ideas or statements’. It does account for a massive ‘group of facts or phenomena’. It is ‘a hypothesis that has been confirmed or established by observation or experiment’ and, by generally informed consent, it is ‘a statement of what are held to be the general laws, principles, or causes of something known or observed’."
"All is fluid, as another Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, said; nothing fixed."
"We are like detectives who come on the scene after a crime has been committed. The murderer's actions have vanished into the past. The detective has no hope of witnessing the actual crime with his own eyes."
"Given the evidence now available, for evolution to be anything other than a fact would require a similar confidence trick by the creator, something that few theists would wish to credit."
"The evening primrose looks yellow to us. But a photograph taken through an ultraviolet filter shows a pattern for the benefit of bees, which we can’t see with normal vision."
"A meadow full of flowers is nature’s Times Square, nature’s Piccadilly Circus."
"Hummingbirds and sunbirds are not particularly closely related. They look and behave like each other because they have converged upon the same way of life."
"For the flower, insect pollination represents a huge advance in economy over the wasteful scattergun of wind pollination."
"From a moth’s point of view, flowers that reliably provide nectar are like docile, productive milch cows."
"Are there other examples of selective breeding by non-human eyes? Oh yes."
"The wild canary is a yellowish brown finch, not spectacular to look at. Human selective breeders have taken the palette of colours thrown up by random genetic variation and manufactured a colour distinctive enough to be named after the bird: canary yellow."
"Much follows from this information, and in detective fiction an almost mystical reverence is accorded to the pathologist’s estimate."
"All clocks exploit some process that occurs at a steady and known rate."
"Like all the radioactive clocks used by geologists, potassium/argon timing works only with so-called igneous rocks."
"Because the relative ordering of the named sedimentary strata is well known, and the same order is found all over the world, we can use igneous rocks that overlie or underlie sedimentary strata, or are embedded in them, to date those named sedimentary strata, and hence the fossils within them."
"The potassium argon clock is only one of many clocks that are available to geologists, all using the same principle on their different timescales."
"Among all the elements that occur on Earth are 150 stable isotopes and 158 unstable ones, making 308 in all."
"Of all the elements, carbon is the one that seems most indispensable to life – the one without which life on any planet is hardest to envisage."
"So, when is the clock zeroed? At the moment when a living creature, whether animal or plant, dies."
"Carbon dating is a comparatively recent invention, going back only to the 1940s."
"Radioactive clocks can be used to give independent estimates of the age of one piece of rock, bearing in mind that all the clocks were zeroed simultaneously when this very same piece of rock solidified."
"Imagine if we could bring Lucy, the magnificent pre-human fossil discovered by Don Johanson, back to life from a deep-freeze and set her kind evolving anew!"
"Prolonged use of antibiotics tends to kill ‘good’ bacteria in the gut, along with the bad ones."
"Many bacterial strains have evolved resistance to antibiotics in spectacularly short periods."
"Monkeys evolved from earthworms." This is false, just as it is false that humans evolved from chimpanzees. Monkeys and earthworms share a common ancestor.
"The common ancestor of monkeys and earthworms was more like an earthworm than like a monkey."
"Monkeys are cleverer [or prettier, have larger genomes, more complicated body plans, etc. etc.] than earthworms."
"Monkeys are more like humans than earthworms are."
"Monkeys [and other ‘higher’ animals] are better at surviving than earthworms [and other ‘lower’ animals]."
"If evolution has had the actual evidence then it would be displayed in museums not just in illustrations."
"There should be overwhelming tons of material evidence not just an isolated thing, but again, there is not evidence."
"You're still lacking the material evidence."
"If they were in the museums which I’ve been to many times, then I would look at them objectively."
"What I’ve seen is that in the museums and in the textbooks whenever they claim to show the evolutionary differences from one species to another, it relies on illustrations and drawings ... not any material evidence."
"We may be ‘wonderfully developed’ but we are not ‘wonderfully made’."
"God, to repeat this important point, which ought to be obvious but isn’t, never made a tiny wing in his eternal life."
"Wings are not made, they grow – progressively – from limb buds inside an egg."
"The early history of embryology was riven between two opposing doctrines called preformationism and epigenesis."
"It is as easy to go from house to blueprint as the other way around, precisely because it is a one-to-one mapping."
"DNA, then, is emphatically not a blueprint."
"No choreographer. No conductor of the orchestra. No central planning. No architect."
"An architect designs a great cathedral. Then, through a hierarchical chain of command, the building operation is broken down into separate departments."
"Each individual bird is just following local rules."
"The beautifully ‘designed’ body emerges as a consequence of rules being locally obeyed by individual cells."
"There is no overall plan of development, no blueprint, no architect’s plan, no architect."
"The development of the embryo, and ultimately of the adult, is achieved by local rules implemented by cells."
"In any animal, cells differ from each other in different parts of the body, even though they are genetically identical, because of their history of asymmetric cell division during the short course of embryonic development."
"Cells in general bristle with ‘labels’, chemical badges that enable them to find their ‘partners’."
"Proteins are chains of smaller molecules called amino acids, and these chains, like the sheets of cells we have been considering, also fold themselves, in highly determined ways but on a much smaller scale."
"All life will turn out to have evolved by a process related to Darwinian natural selection of genes."
"Natural selection is the differential survival of successful genes rather than alternative, less successful genes in gene pools."
"It is genes which determine sequences of amino acids, which determine tertiary structures of proteins, which determine the socket-like shapes of active sites, which determine cell chemistry, which determine ‘starling-like’ cell behaviour in embryonic development."
"One might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends."
"The Galapagos land iguana is not greatly different from iguanas still living on the mainland, whereas the marine iguanas are unique to the Galapagos archipelago."
"The animals and plants of each island of Galapagos are largely endemic to the archipelago (‘aboriginal creations’), but they are also for the most part unique, in detail, from island to island."
"My attention was first thoroughly aroused, by comparing together the numerous specimens, of the mocking-thrushes, when, to my astonishment, I discovered that all those from Charles Island belonged to one species (Mimus trifasciatus); all from Albemarle Island to M. parvulus; and all from James and Chatham Islands belonged to M. melanotis."
"The fauna and flora of a particular region are just what we should expect if, to quote Darwin on the finches that now bear his name, ‘one species had been taken and modified for different ends’."
"Tortoises can survive for weeks without food or fresh water, easily long enough to float in the Humboldt Current from South America to the Galapagos archipelago."
"The Large, the Medium and the Small Ground Finch originally diverged on different islands; the three species now coexist on most of the Galapagos islands, never interbreeding and each specializing in a different kind of seed diet."
"The tortoise story adds to the finch model the further complication that, for tortoises, volcanoes are islands within islands."
"The cichlids of Africa’s lakes impress us mightily with what evolution can do in a short space of time."
"In Australia there are, or were until recent extinctions possibly caused by the arrival of aboriginal people, the ecological equivalents of wolves, cats, rabbits, moles, shrews, lions, flying squirrels and many others."
"Think what the geographical distribution of animals should look like if they’d all dispersed from Noah’s Ark."
"It is almost too ridiculous to mention it, but I’m afraid I have to because of the more than 40 per cent of the American population who, as I lamented in Chapter 1, accept the Bible literally."
"Why would an all-powerful creator decide to plant his carefully crafted species on islands and continents in exactly the appropriate pattern to suggest, irresistibly, that they had evolved and dispersed from the site of their evolution?"
"We should expect, and we find, that animals share the same continent with species that resemble them."
"The skeletons of all mammals are identical, but their individual bones are different."
"The DNA code is invariant across all living creatures, while the individual genes themselves vary."
"For instance, if you mix human with chimp DNA, much of the fragmented human DNA will bond with other human DNA fragments, and much of the chimp DNA will bond with its own kind."
"The newest method of measuring the similarity between a pair of matching genes from different species is the most direct, and the most expensive: actually read the sequence of letters in the genes themselves, using the same methods as were used for the Human Genome Project."
"Having obtained a single number representing the similarity between each pair of species, we then place the figures in a table."
"What actually happens turns out to be – within statistical margins of error – just what we should expect on the assumption that evolution has happened."
"Comparative DNA (or protein) evidence can be used to decide – on the evolutionary assumption – which pairs of animals are closer cousins than which others."
"Every gene delivers approximately the same tree of life. Once again, this is exactly what you would expect if you were dealing with a true family tree."
"The Penny study was published in 1982, quite a while ago now. The intervening years have seen a prolific multiplication of detailed evidence on the exact sequences of genes of lots and lots of species of animals and plants."
"Far more convincingly even than the (also highly convincing) fossil evidence, the evidence from comparisons among genes is converging, rapidly and decisively, on a single great tree of life."
"If molecular genetic technology continues to expand at its present exponential rate, by the year 2050 deriving the complete sequence of an animal’s genome will be cheap and quick, scarcely any more trouble than taking its temperature or its blood pressure."
"The molecular clock assumes that evolution is true, and that it proceeds at a sufficiently constant rate through geological time to be used as a clock in its own right, provided that it can be calibrated using fossils, which are in turn calibrated with radioactive clocks."
"A browsing giraffe, a soaring albatross, a diving swift, a swooping falcon, a leafy sea dragon invisible among the seaweed, a sprinting cheetah at full stretch after a swerving, pronking gazelle – the illusion of design makes so much intuitive sense that it becomes a positive effort to put critical thinking into gear and overcome the seductions of naïve intuition."
"It is mere rubbish, thinking at present of the origin of life; one might as well think of the origin of matter."
"The whole thing is nothing but a ‘patchwork of makeshifts pieced together, as it were, from what was available when opportunity knocked, and accepted in the hindsight, not the foresight, of natural selection."
"Natural selection is an improbability pump: a process that generates the statistically improbable."
"The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation."
"Each organic being is striving to increase at a geometrical ratio; that each at some period of its life, during some season of the year, during each generation or at intervals, has to struggle for life, and to suffer great destruction."
"The war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply."
"It remains a matter for interesting discussion why it has to be so damned painful."
"Although it is possible that ours is the only planet in the galaxy that has life, in order for that to be true, the probability of life arising on a planet would have to be not much greater than one in a billion."
"The theory that we seek, of the origin of life on this planet, should therefore positively not be a plausible theory!"
"We are entitled to be satisfied with an implausible theory."
"Life is very rare, but the number of planets is so large that we are probably not alone."
"Millions of islands of life in the universe could still be so far apart t"
"Evolution is not a theory in crisis. It is an idea that has been solidly confirmed by science."
"The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference."
"We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further."