Science is being daily more and more personified and anthromorphized into a god. By and by they will say that science took our nature upon him, and sent down his only begotten son, Charles Darwin, or Huxley, into the world so that those who believe in him, &c. ; and they will burn people for saying that science, after all, is only an expression for our ignorance of our own ignorance.
It would be as unthinkable to try to construct the Labour Party without Marx as it would to be to establish university faculties of astronomy,anthropology or psychology without permitting the study of Copernicus, Darwin or Freud, and still expect such faculties to be taken seriously
We shall certainly not advance matters by jumping up and down shrilling, 'Darwin is god and I, so-and-so, am his prophet.
A remarkable parallel, which I think has never been noticed, obtains between the facts of social evolution on the one hand, and of zological evolution as expounded by Mr. Darwin on the other.
Legendary innovators like Franklin, Snow, and Darwin all possess some common intellectual qualities—a certain quickness of mind, unbounded curiosity—but they also share one other defining attribute. They have a lot of hobbies.
Charles Darwin got totally hammered, woke up next to a monkey and decided he had to come up with a theory to make it all okay.
Our own existence once presented the greatest of all mysteries, but. . . it is a mystery no longer because it is solved. Darwin and Wallace solved it. . . I was surprised that so many people seemed not only unaware of the elegant and beautiful solution to this deepest of problems but, incredibly, in many cases actually unaware that there was a problem in the first place!
The danger is to cling to comfort and custom at a time when events demand breaking away from both. But it is also foolish to jump at every startling moment. Darwin selects primarily for prudent fast-following.
An intelligent couple can read their Darwin and know that the ultimate reason for their sexual urges is procreation. They know that the woman cannot conceive because she is on the pill. Yet they find that their sexual desire is in no way diminished by the knowledge. Sexual desire is sexual desire and its force, in an individual's psychology, is independent of the ultimate Darwinian pressure that drove it. It is a strong urge which exists independently of its ultimate rationale.
Clausius and Darwin cannot both be right.
Anything, even the conceptually most complex material, can be written for general audiences without any dumbing down. Of course you have to explain things carefully. This goes back to Galileo, who wrote his great books as dialogues in Italian, not as treatises in Latin. And to Darwin, who wrote The Origin of Species for general readers. I think a lot of people pick up Darwin's book and assume it must be a popular version of some technical monograph, but there is no technical monograph. That's what he wrote. So what I'm doing is part of a great humanistic tradition.
As the great naturalist Charles Darwin saw clearly, individual and collective interests often coincide, as in the invisible hand narrative. But he also saw that in many other cases, interests at the two levels are squarely in conflict, and that in those cases, individual interests generally trump. That simple observation suggests that market failure is often the result not of insufficient competition (the traditional charge from social critics on the Left), but of the very logic of competition itself.
The next darwin is more likely to be a data wonk than a naturalist wandering through an exotic landscape.
I think that I could see Darwin having a relationship with Asia.
It was Herbert Spencer, not Charles Darwin, who coined the phrase Survival of the Fittest.
If you found a mammal with feathers, then you'd know that Darwin was wrong. Well, it's rather the same with memes.
People say I am against Darwin. That is ridiculous.
Thank God for Darwin, eh?
Marathon running, for me, was the most controlled test of mettle that I could ever think of. It's you against Darwin.
Despite some remaining puzzles, there's no reason to doubt that Darwin had this point right, that all creatures on earth are biological relatives