"People think I'm trying to save fluffy animals.
But I'm trying to stop the human race from committing suicide."
Gerald Durrell, conservationist, author, zookeeper 1925-1995
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 Darwin, (the conclusion of) The Origin of Species, 1859
[Punctuated Equilibrium is] Evolution by Jerks.
[Continuous Change is] Evolution by Creeps.
Edward O. Wilson vs Stephen Jay Gould
Is it through your grandfather or your grandmother
that you claim descent from a monkey?
I would be less ashamed to have a monkey for my grandfather,
than to be connected to a man who used his great gifts to obscure the truth.
Bishop Samuel Wilberforce ("Soapy Sam") vs Thomas Henry Huxley ("Darwin's
Bulldog"),
Oxford University Museum, 30 June 1860
The exact words of the debate are not recorded
An organism is a gene's way of making copies of itself.
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 1976
Survival of the fittest
Herbert Spencer, Principles of Biology, 1864
The saying is unscientific and much parodied (Survival of the fattest, etc)
Nature, red in tooth and claw
Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A[rthur] H[enry] H[allam], 1850
[The state of nature is]
such a war as is of every man against every man.
[Life in a state of nature is]
solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.
Thomas Hobbes, philosopher of 'natural law', Leviathan, XIII, 1651
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