For Darwin’s theory to succeed it had to explain both the wonderful variety of nature and its astonishing complexity. It does both with the utmost elegance. ibid.
Natural selection drove the development of the human brain ... A brain arose which was able to look around the world and ask perhaps for the very first time the question – Why? Why are we here? ibid.
The evidence for evolution grows day by day, and has never been stronger. At the same time, paradoxically, ill-informed opposition is also stronger than I can remember. Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth preface
The plight of many science teachers today is not less dire. When they attempt to expound the central and guiding principle of biology; when they honestly place the living world in its historical context – which means evolution, when they explore and explain the very nature of life itself, they are harried and stymied, hassled and bullied. ibid. p4
The issues go wider than what is currently taught in one college. There is a growing anxiety about what will be taught and how it will be taught in the new generation of proposed faith schools. ibid. p5 letter co-written with Bishop Harries et al to Tony Blair
More than 40 per cent of Americans deny that humans evolved from other animals, and think that we – and by implication all of life – were created by God within the last 10,000 years. ibid. p7
All too many preachers, while agreeing that evolution is true and Adam and Eve never existed, will then blithely go into the pulpit and make some moral or theological point about Adam and Eve in their sermons without once mentioning that, of course, Adam and Eve never actually existed! ibid. pp7-8
Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is 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. ibid. p8
Alfred Russel Wallace, independent co-discoverer with Darwin of evolution by natural selection, actually called his paper ‘On the tendency of varieties to depart indefinitely from the original type’. ibid. p22
Not only is the first chapter of On the Origin of Species all about domestic varieties of animals and plants; Darwin also wrote a whole book on the subject ... Another familiar example is the sculpting of the wolf, Canis lupus. ibid. p27
The main point I want to draw out of domestication is its astonishing power to change the shape and behaviour of wild animals, and the speed with which it does so. Breeders are almost like modellers with endlessly malleable clay ... This is why Darwin gave so much prominence to domestication at the beginning of On the Origin of Species. ibid. p28
How easy it is for the non-random selection of genes – the 'carving and whittling' of gene pools – to produce truly dramatic changes in anatomy and behaviour, and so fast. ibid. p37
Gene pools, on the other hand, are continually added to, for example by mutation, while at the same time non-random death subtracts. ibid. p37
That’s an important less in evolution, by the way. Different species do things in different ways, and we often won’t understand the differences until we have examined the whole economy of the species. ibid. p49
Darwin’s special genius realized that nature could play the role of selecting agent ... you don’t have to have a choosing agent. The choice can be made automatically by survival – or failure to survive. Survival counts, Darwin realised, because only survivors reproduce and pass on the genes (Darwin didn’t use the world) that helped them to survive. ibid. pp62-63
It is the lesson of trade-offs ... Nothing is free, everything comes with a price tag ... A body is a patchwork of compromises. ibid. p69
Wild foxes are tricky to handle, and Belyaev set out deliberately to breed for tameness ... After a mere six generations of this selective breeding for tameness, the foxes had changed so much that the experimenters felt obliged to name a new category ... Such results are perhaps not too surprising, except for the astonishing magnitude and speed of the effect. Thirty-five generations would pass unnoticed on the geological timescale ... The tame foxes not only behaved like domestic dogs, they looked like them. They lost their foxy pelage and became piebald black and white, like Welsh collies. Their foxy prick ears were replaced by doggy floppy ears ... These dog-like features were side-effects. Belyaev and his team did not not deliberately breed for them, only for tameness. ibid. pp75-76
There are two small islets off the Croatian coast called Pod Kopiste and Pod Mrcaru. In 1971 a population of common Mediterranean lizards, Podarcis sicula, which mainly eat insects, was present on Pod Kopiste but there were none on Pod Mrcaru. In that year experimenters transported five pairs of Padarcis sicula from Pod Kopiste and released them on Pod Mrcaru ... Herrel and his colleagues made observations on the descendants of the transported lizards and compared them with lizards living on the original ancestral island. There were marked differences. ibid. pp113-114
The Lenski experiments are distressing to creationists, and for a very good reason. They are a beautiful demonstration of evolution in action ... E. coli is a common bacterium ... These twelve flasks founded twelve lines of evolution that we destined to be kept separate from one another for two decades and counting ... Each tribe had a new flask every day ... This means about 7,000 ‘flask generations’ and 45,000 bacterial generations ... different tribes developed different sets of mutation. ibid. pp117-121
Many of the problems that we meet in evolutionary argumentation arise only because animals are inconsiderate enough to evolve at different rates, and might even be inconsiderate enough not to evolve at all. ibid. pp140-141
Evolution could so easily be disproved if just a single fossil turned up in the wrong date order. Evolution has passed this test with flying colours. ibid. p147
We now have a rich supply of intermediate fossils linking modern humans to the common ancestor that we share with – chimpanzees. ibid. p150
Every one of the millions of species of animals shares an ancestor with every other one. ibid. p152
Once again, humans are not descended from monkeys. We share a common ancestor with monkeys ... Huge leaps in a single generation – which is what a monkey giving birth to a human would be – are almost as unlikely as divine creation. ibid. p155
The move from water to land launched a major redesign of every aspect of life, from breathing to reproduction: it was a great trek through biological space. Nevertheless, with what seems almost wanton perversity, a good number of thoroughgoing land animals later turned around, abandoned their hard-earned terrestrial retooling, and trooped back into the water again. ibid. p169
The common ancestor that we share with chimpanzees lived about six million years ago, or a bit earlier. ibid. p188
So we have fine fossil documentation of gradual change, all the way from Lucy, the ‘upright-walking-chimp’ of three million years ago, to ourselves today. ibid. p198
All that matters is that the two populations were isolated from one another for long enough so that, when time and chance eventually reunited them, they found they had diverged so much that they couldn’t interbreed any more. ibid. p255
Darwin later came to recognize the crucial importance of islands and archipelagos for his theory, and he did several experiments to settle questions about the theory of geographical isolation as a prelude to speciation. ibid. p271
Darwin was well aware of the significance of the geographical distribution of species for his theory of evolution. ibid. p272
What Darwin didn’t – couldn’t – know is that the comparative evidence becomes even more convincing when we include molecular genetics, in addition to the anatomical comparisons that were available to him. ibid. p315
Natural selection promptly penalizes the bad mutations. Individuals possessing them are more likely to die and less likely to reproduce, and this automatically removes the mutations from the gene pool. Every animal and plant genome is subject to a constant bombardment of deleterious mutations: a hailstorm of attrition. ibid. p352
Major mutations, even if they cause improvements in generally the right direction, almost always require a lot of subsequent tinkering – a sweeping-up operation by lots of small mutations that come along later and are favoured by selection because they smooth out the rough edges left by the initial large mutation. ibid. p355
Giraffe: On its downward journey, the nerve (at this point it is bundled in with the larger vagus nerve) passes within inches of the larynx, which is its final destination. Yet it proceeds down the whole length of the neck before turning round and going all the way back up again ... The creationist, Owen, failed to draw the obvious conclusion. ibid. p362
The problem, of course, is that our ancestors walked for hundreds of millions of years with the backbone held more-or-less horizontally, and it doesn’t take kindly to the sudden readjustment imposed by the last few million. ibid. p369
The cheetah, if we are going to talk design at all, is superbly equipped to escape from those very same cheetahs. For heaven’s sake, who side is the designer on? When you look at the cheetah’s taut muscles and flexing backbone, you must conclude that the designer wants the cheetah to win the race. But when you look at the sprinting, jinking, dodging gazelle, you reach exactly the opposite conclusion. Does the designer’s left hand not know what his right hand is doing? Is he a sadist, who enjoys the spectator sport and is forever upping the ante on both sides to increase the thrill of the chase? ibid. p384