#darwin

Truly, this earth is a trophy cup for the industrious man. And this rightly so, in the service of natural selection. He who does not possess the force to secure his Lebensraum in this world, and, if necessary, to enlarge it, does not deserve to possess the necessities of life. He must step aside and allow stronger peoples to pass him by. ↗

— Adolf Hitler

#nazism #social-darwinism #life

For more than a year, he'd felt destined to marry Isabel Arundell; now, suddenly, he wasn't so sure. He loved her, that was certain, but he also resented her. He loved her strength and practicality but resented her overbearing personality and tendency to do things on his behalf without consulting him first; loved that she tolerated his interest in all things exotic and erotic but hated her blinkered Catholicism. Charles Darwin had killed God but she and her family, like so many others, still clung to the delusion. ↗

— Mark Hodder

#catholicism #charles-darwin #god #love #religion

To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I confess, absurd in the highest degree...The difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection , though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered subversive of the theory. ↗

— Charles Darwin

#confessions-of-the-darwinists #conjecture #darwin #darwinism #darwinist-confessions

Neo-Darwinists say that new species emerge when mutations occur and modify an organism. I was taught over and over again that the accumulation of random mutations led to evolutionary change [which] led to new species. I believed it until I looked for evidence. ↗

— Lynn Margulis

#evolution #macro-evolution #macroevolution #speciation #change

I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my father, brother and almost all of my friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine. ↗

— Charles Darwin

#charles-darwin #religion #skepticism #men

Shallow men believe in luck or in circumstance. Strong men believe in cause and effect. ↗

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

#causation #cause-and-effect #chance #darwinism #inspirational

Biology has progressed tremendously due to the model that Darwin put forth. But the black boxes Darwin accepted are now being opened, and our view of the world is again being shaken. ↗

— Michael Behe

#again #being #biology #black #boxes

Darwin's idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition. ↗

— Daniel Dennett

#darwin #direction #idea #makes #natural

Blind metaphysical necessity, which is certainly the same always and every where, could produce no variety of things. All that diversity of natural things which we find suited to different times and places could arise from nothing but the ideas and will of a Being, necessarily existing. ↗

— Isaac Newton

#evolution #id #intelligent-design #macroevolution #naturalism

The four most influential moderns: Darwin, Marx, Freud, and (the productive) Einstein were scholars but not academics. It has always been hard to do genuine - and no perishable - work within institutions ↗

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#academics #darwin #einstein #freud #institutions