understanding Quotes

For me, the level at which natural selection causes the phenomenon of adaptation is the level of the replicator - the gene.

Our animal origins are constantly lurking behind, even if they are filtered through complicated social evolution.

Why did humans lose their body hair? Why did they start walking on their hind legs? Why did they develop big brains? I think that the answer to all three questions is sexual selection.

For the first half of geological time our ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria, and each one of our trillions of cells is a colony of bacteria.

But perhaps the rest of us could have separate classes in science appreciation, the wonder of science, scientific ways of thinking, and the history of scientific ideas, rather than laboratory experience.

You can't even begin to understand biology, you can't understand life, unless you understand what it's all there for, how it arose - and that means evolution.

My personal feeling is that understanding evolution led me to atheism.

My interest in biology was pretty much always on the philosophical side.

It's very likely that most mammals have consciousness, and probably birds, too.

The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity.