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Quotes about science

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This preservation of favourable variations and the rejection of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection.
Charles Darwin1809–1882On the Origin of Species (1859), Chapter IV (1 of 2)In context
- Nature
It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.
Charles Darwin1809–1882On the Origin of Species (1859), Chapter IV (1 of 2)In context
- Nature
As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications.
Charles Darwin1809–1882On the Origin of Species (1859), Chapter IV (2 of 2)In context
- Life & Death
- Nature
One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.
Charles Darwin1809–1882On the Origin of Species (1859), Chapter VIIIn context
- Life & Death
- Nature
What can be more curious than that the hand of a man, formed for grasping, that of a mole for digging, the leg of the horse, the paddle of the porpoise, and the wing of the bat, should all be constructed on the same pattern, and should include the same bones, in the same relative positions?
Charles Darwin1809–1882On the Origin of Species (1859), Chapter XIIIIn context
- Nature
When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled.
Charles Darwin1809–1882On the Origin of Species (1859), Chapter XIVIn context
- Nature
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
Charles Darwin1809–1882On the Origin of Species (1859), Chapter XIVIn context
- Life & Death
- Nature
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.
Richard Dawkinsborn 1941The Blind Watchmaker
Paley’s argument is made with passionate sincerity and is informed by the best biological scholarship of his day, but it is wrong, gloriously and utterly wrong.
Richard Dawkinsborn 1941The Blind Watchmaker
Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence, and they get results. Myths and faiths are not and do not.
Richard Dawkinsborn 1941River out of Eden (1995)
- Anti-Religion
Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.
Richard Dawkinsborn 1941The Blind Watchmaker (1986), Chapter 1 “Explaining the Very Improbable” (p. 6)
- Atheism
The world becomes full of organisms that have what it takes to become ancestors. That, in a sentence, is Darwinism.
Richard Dawkinsborn 1941River out of Eden (1995)
To explain the origin of the DNA/protein machine by invoking a supernatural Designer is to explain precisely nothing, for it leaves unexplained the origin of the Designer.
Richard Dawkinsborn 1941The Blind Watchmaker (1986), Chapter 6 “Origins and Miracles” (p. 141)
- Anti-God
It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).
Richard Dawkinsborn 1941Reviewing Blueprints: Solving the Mystery of Evolution (1989) by Maitland A. Edey and Donald C. Johanson
- Clever Jabs
The universe 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.
Richard Dawkinsborn 1941River out of Eden (1995), pp. 131–132
- Good & Evil