#darwin

I have often said that I am a passionate Darwinian when it comes to explaining why we exist. ↗

— Richard Dawkins

#comes #darwinian #exist #explaining #i

Sometimes Alton Darwin would talk to me about the planet he was on before he was transported in a steel box to Athena. 'Drugs were food,' he said. 'I was in the food business. Just because people on one planet eat a certain kind of food they're hungry for, that makes them feel better after they eat it, that doesn't mean people on other planets shouldn't eat something else. On some planets I'm sure there are people who eat stones, and then feel wonderful for a little while afterwords. Then it's time to eat stones again. ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#drugs #life #point-of-view #business

My theory of evolution is that Darwin was adopted. ↗

— Steven Wright

#darwin #evolution #theory

But it is one of these sort of mythologies about America and its intellectual history, that the right embraced this thing called social Darwinism, when it never did so. ↗

— Jonah Goldberg

#america #called #darwinism #did #embraced

There was no intellectual movement in American history called social Darwinism. The people who were supposedly the leaders of the social Darwinist movement never embraced something called social Darwinism. It didn't exist. ↗

— Jonah Goldberg

#american history #called #darwinism #embraced #exist

The people who had the most impact on me when I was young were Freud and Darwin, but growing up I also had my film idols. ↗

— Hugh Hefner

#darwin #film #freud #growing #growing up

The idea that one can go to the fossil record and expect to empirically recover an ancestor-descendant sequence, be it of species, genera, families, or whatever, has been, and continues to be, a pernicious illusion. ↗

— Gareth J. Nelson

#darwin #darwinism #evolution #fossil-record #fossils

The law of evolution is that the strongest survives!' 'Yes, and the strongest, in the existence of any social species, are those who are most social. In human terms, most ethical...There is no strength to be gained from hurting one another. Only weakness. ↗

— Ursula K. Le Guin

#ethics #evolution #p #law

How can we find spiritual meaning in a scientific worldview? Spirituality is a way of being in the world, a sense of one’s place in the cosmos, a relationship to that which extends beyond oneself. . . . Does scientific explanation of the world diminish its spiritual beauty? I think not. Science and spirituality are complementary, not conflicting; additive, not detractive. Anything that generates a sense of awe may be a source of spirituality. Science does this in spades. (158-159) ↗

— Michael Shermer

#darwinism #evolution #intelligent-design #science #spirituality

If you have Darwin, Christ and Nietzsche, they're all going to talk at once. You need somebody who listens. ↗

— David Duchovny

#darwin #going #listens #need #nietzsche