Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception. Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience
The fossil record implies trial and error, the inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with a Great Designer (though not a Designer of a more remote and indirect temperament.) Carl Sagan, Cosmos
Secluded in his rural laboratory Darwin’s manuscript on what he was already calling Natural Selection developed into an essay suitable for publication. Some of his text draw on the experiences he had on his round the world Beagle expedition. Out of the five years he spent on the voyage he had stayed just five weeks on the Galapagos Islands collecting specimens of plants and different species of mocking birds and finches. The significance of his Galapagos experience in the development of his theory has been overstated. Darwin’s Struggle: The Evolution of the Origin of Species
Darwin’s 1844 manuscript was based on wide reading. From Milton’s Paradise Lost to the evolutionary speculations of his grandfather Erasmus and the radical French biologist Jean Baptiste Lamarck. His great geologist mentor Charles Lyle taught him that the Earth’s surface had been formed gradually over countless ages. But it was the political economist Thomas Malthus who would stimulate the closest parallel to a Eureka moment that Darwin would ever have. ibid.
In the late summer of 1859 Charles Darwin finally completed the last paragraph of his greatest work On the Origin of Species. ibid.
In the 1840s transmutation or evolution was still a radical idea, associated with social revolution. ibid.
To counter the creationists he became a beekeeper in order to show that near perfect hexagons in honeycombs were raised by instinct and not by design. ibid.
By 1844 Darwin had placed Malthus’s ideas on population at the core of his theory of national selection as a mechanism by which evolution occurred. The war of nature destroyed the weaklings. ibid.
It is harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man. H L Mencken, 1880-1956
It was Darwin’s chief contribution, not only to Biology but to the whole of natural science, to have brought to light a process by which contingencies a priori improbable are given, in the process of time, an increasing probability, until it is their non-occurrence, rather than their occurrence, which becomes highly probable. R A Fisher, 1890-1962
In the literal sense, there has been no relevant evolution since the trek from Africa. But there has been substantial progress towards higher standards of rights, justice and freedom – along with all too many illustrations of how remote is the goal of a decent society. Noam Chomsky
There are many aspects of the universe that still cannot be explained satisfactorily by science; but ignorance only implies ignorance that may someday be conquered. To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today. Isaac Asimov, The Threat of Creationism
The fundamentalists deny that evolution has taken place; they deny that the earth and the universe as a whole are more than a few thousand years old, and so on. There is ample scientific evidence that the fundamentalists are wrong in these matters, and that their notions of cosmogony have about as much basis in fact as the Tooth Fairy has. Isaac Asimov, cited James A Haught, ‘2000 Years of Disbelief: Famous People with the Courage to Doubt’, 1996
Darwinian man though well behaved, is really but a monkey shaved! Gilbert & Sullivan, Princess Ida
Lead us, Evolution, lead us
Up the future’s endless stair;
Chop us, change us, prod us, weed us,
For stagnation is despair:
Groping, guessing, yet progressing,
Lead us nobody knows where. C S Lewis, Evolutionary Hymn
There are some four million different kinds of animals and plants in the world. Four million different solutions to the problems of staying alive. David Attenborough, Life on Earth I: The Infinite Variety, BBC 1979
There are several hundred thousand different insects that have been named. ibid.
The Beagle sailed around South America and into the Pacific. ibid.
The Galapagos Islands got their name from the herds of tortoises that live on them. ibid.
The suspicion grew in Darwin’s mind that species were not fixed for ever. ibid.
He called the mechanism Natural Selection. ibid.
Why – 50 million years ago – did they all die out? There’s not one surviving ammonite today. David Attenborough, Life on Earth II: Building Bodies
Segmentation was a great evolutionary success. ibid.
These first plants were simple algae. David Attenborough, Life on Earth III: The First Forests
The biggest living organism of any kind is a conifer – the Giant Sequoia. ibid.
Variation is the raw material of evolution. David Attenborough, Life on Earth IV: The Swarming Hordes
350 million years ago … the fish began to haul themselves on to the land. David Attenborough, Life on Earth VI: Invasion of the Land
You and I belong to the most widespread and dominant species on Earth. We live on the icecaps at the pole and in the tropical jungles at the equator. David Attenborough, Life on Earth XIII: The Compulsive Communicators
4,000 million of us today ... The story starts back in Africa. ibid.
Apes had come down from the trees. ibid.
The early people hunted in teams. ibid.
Upright man was in Europe in some numbers. Now the climate of Europe changed. ibid.
The rise of social insects sixty million years after the first mammals was a landmark in evolution. David Attenborough, The Life of Mammals II: Insect Hunters ***** BBC 2002
The rise of a whole new branch of vertebrate life – the most complex animals yet to appear on Earth. David Attenborough’s Rise of the Animals: Triumph of the Vertebrates: Dawn of the Mammals, BBC 2013
The first creature with the beginnings of a backbone lived over 500 million years ago. ibid.
The ocean is by no means uniform. Differences in depth, temperature, sunlight and currents pose particular challenges. One and a half miles down these hydro-thermal vents spew out super-heated water at 450° Centigrade from cracks in the Earth’s crust. Despite the enormous pressure, total darkness and scoldingly high temperatures the ancestors of all life may have evolved from a place just like this. David Attenborough, Life e8: Creatures of the Deep, BBC 2009
I just want to go back and show where this whole thing started. When I was a boy that was regarded as totally unknown. There was no evidence of how life started. And today there is evidence. David Attenborough
Quite a lot of people are upset that the findings of evolutionary science don’t coincide with what is written in Genesis. And there are people who think Genesis should be taken literally. David Attenborough, interview Horizon: A War on Science, BBC 2006
Only the fittest survive – and that was the key. He called the process Natural Selection. David Attenborough, Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life, BBC 2009
A hundred and fifty years after the publication of Darwin’s revolutionary book, modern genetics has confirmed its fundamental truth – all life is related. And it enables us to construct with confidence the complex tree that represents the history of Life. ibid.
Darwin’s great insight revolutionised the way in which we see the world. We now understand why there are so many different species. Why they are distributed the way they are around the world. And why their bodies and our bodies are shaped in the way that they are. Because we understand that bacteria evolve, we can devise methods of dealing with the diseases they cause. And because we can disentangle the complex relationships between animals and plants in the natural community, we can foresee some of the consequences when we start to interfere with those communities. But above all, Darwin has shown us that we are not apart from the natural world. We do not have dominion over it. We are subject to its law and processes as are all other animals on Earth, to which indeed we are related. ibid.