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Evolutionary Biologist Inspirational Quotes (793)

Page 33 of 34
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The god hypothesis is no longer of any pragmatic value for the interpretation or comprehension of nature, and indeed often stands in the way of better and truer interpretation. Operationally, God is beginning to resemble not a ruler, but the last fading smile of a cosmic Cheshire Cat.
Julian Huxley
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All organisms vary, and it's just folk knowledge. You just have to look around a room of people, and everybody knows that it's true. Darwin didn't know the mechanism of heredity, but you don't have to. You just need to know the fact of it.
Stephen Jay Gould
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Antiessentialist thinking forces us to view the world differently. We must accept shadings and continua as fundamental. We lose criteria for judgment by comparison to some ideal: short people, retarded people, people of other beliefs, colors, and religions are people of full status.
Stephen Jay Gould
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At a minimum, in explaining evolutionary pathways through time, the constraints imposed by history rise to equal prominence with the immediate advantages of adaptation.
Stephen Jay Gould
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I thought perhaps it should be recognized that religious people, including fundamentalists, are quite intelligent, many of them are highly educated, and they should be treated with complete respect.
E. O. Wilson
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By any reasonable measure of achievement, the faith of the Enlightenment thinkers in science was justified. Today the greatest divide within humanity is not between races, or religions, or even, as is widely believed, between the literate and illiterate. It is the chasm that separates scientific from prescientific cultures.
E. O. Wilson
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Far from being demeaning to human spiritual values, scientific rationalism is the crowning glory of the human spirit. Of course you can use the products of science to do bad things, but you can use them to do good things too.
Richard Dawkins
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Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do.
Richard Dawkins
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Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one.
Richard Dawkins
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But we all recognise the primary foible of frail humanity - our propensity for embracing hope and shunning logic, our tendency to believe what we desire rather than what we observe.
Stephen Jay Gould
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As a scientist, I am hostile to fundamentalist religion because it actively debauches the scientific enterprise. It teaches us not to change our minds, and not to want to know exciting things that are available to be known. It subverts science and saps the intellect.
Richard Dawkins
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The odd thing about tradition is, the longer it's been going, the more people seem to take it seriously - as though sheer passage of time makes something which to begin with was just made up, turns it into what people believe as a fact.
Richard Dawkins
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Religious faith not only lacks evidence, its independence from evidence is its pride and joy, shouted from the rooftops.
Richard Dawkins
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I am at a loss to reconcile the expensive and glossy production values of this book with the breathtaking inanity of the content.
Richard Dawkins
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Evolution as a process that has always gone on in the history of the earth can only be doubted by those who are ignorant of the evidence or are resistant to evidence, owing to emotional blocks or plain bigotry.
Theodosius Dobzhansky
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Having a debate with a modern Christian is like punching a sponge.
Richard Dawkins
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All three of the Abrahamic religions were born and nurtured in arid, disturbed environments.
E. O. Wilson
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When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly half way between. It is possible for one side simply to be wrong.
Richard Dawkins
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We're going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones.
Richard Dawkins
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But once the ants and termites jumped the high barrier that prevents the vast variety of evolving animal groups from becoming fully social, they dominated the world.
E. O. Wilson
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Do those people who hold up the Bible as an inspiration to moral rectitude have the slightest notion of what is actually written in it?
Richard Dawkins
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What we need is an electronic encyclopedia of life, with one page for each species. On each page is given everything known about that species.
E. O. Wilson
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There is economics in biology, nothing is free, everything has to be paid for, there are costs as well as benefits to everything in life, for example, there was never sufficient natural selection pressure to develop better eyes, individuals could earn other things like smiley smiles rather than waste energy & time on better eyes.
Richard Dawkins
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Eternal vigilance, as they say, is the price of freedom. Add intellectual integrity to the cost basis.
Stephen Jay Gould
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