Zitat des Tages über Darwin:
Darwin himself recorded the fact that he accepted the Malthusian idea.
Mr. Darwin contributes some striking and ingenious instances of the way in which the principle partially affects the chain, or rather network of life, even to the total obliteration of certain meshes.
I was socially isolated as a kid. I had friends, but I wasn't very good at sports and that sort of thing so I became quite comfortable being by myself, exploring. The world was my private playground, and in it, I was supreme. Darwin, Faraday, Huxley and other great scientists were my companions.
I was brought up to understand Darwin's theory of evolution. I spent hours and hours in the Natural History Museum in London looking at the descriptions of how different kinds of animals had evolved, looking at the sequence of fossil bones looking gradually more and more and more and more like the modern fossil.
A major fault, for example, is the fact that, along with the materialist principle, Darwin introduced into his theory of evolution reactionary Malthusian ideas.
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.
We entered the 20th century trying to deal with three ideas purporting to define or describe or explain three spheres of action, development and conflict: Darwin on the natural world, Freud on the internal world, Marx on the economic world.
Even when Darwin's teaching first made its appearance, it became clear at once that its scientific, materialist core, its teaching concerning the evolution of living nature, was antagonistic to the idealism that reigned in biology.
Before Darwin, our world was very religious. People saw altruism as something given by God for us to be good so that we could go to Paradise.
For all the creationists out there, Darwin's just an atheist. But he was actually agnostic.
Although Darwin was able to persuade much of the world that a modern eye could be produced gradually from a much simpler structure, he did not even attempt to explain how the simple light sensitive spot that was his starting point actually worked.
My theory of evolution is that Darwin was adopted.
Every one of my positions cuts - out half the country. I'm pro-choice, I'm pro-gay rights, I'm pro-immigration, I'm against guns, I believe in Darwin.
People say I am against Darwin. That is ridiculous.
It's an established fact. Some women can't stand being pregnant, getting big and bloated, and hauling around a giant stomach, and some women, for reasons probably understood by Darwin, love it.
Mr. Darwin refers to the multitude of the individual of every species, which, from one cause or another, perish either before, or soon after attaining maturity.
No naturalist has devoted more painstaking attention to the structure of the barnacles than Mr. Darwin.
The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin.
If you have Darwin, Christ and Nietzsche, they're all going to talk at once. You need somebody who listens.
Darwin recognized the fact that paleontology then seemed to provide evidence against rather for evolution in general or the gradual origin of taxonomic categories in particular.
But, as we have before been led to remark, most of Mr. Darwin's statements elude, by their vagueness and incompleteness, the test of Natural History facts.
In Darwin's time all of biology was a black box: not only the cell, or the eye, or digestion, or immunity, but every biological structure and function because, ultimately, no one could explain how biological processes occurred.
Agricultural practice served Darwin as the material basis for the elaboration of his theory of Evolution, which explained the natural causation of the adaptation we see in the structure of the organic world. That was a great advance in the knowledge of living nature.
Darwin himself, in his day, was unable to fight free of the theoretical errors of which he was guilty. It was the classics of Marxism that revealed those errors and pointed them out.
I'd love to meet Darwin. He caused such controversy over whether God created the earth in six days or whether we evolved over time. I'd love to discuss that with him - what a fantastic conversation!
Darwin investigated the numerous facts obtained by naturalists in living nature and analysed them through the prism of practical experience.
If you hide information from people, don't want people to see the Ten Commandments or don't want people to hear about Darwin, aren't we hiding things that we know from our future generations? I just think that that's incorrect.
I am sure I was an evolutionist in the abstract, or by the quality and complexion of my mind, before I read Darwin, but to become an evolutionist in the concrete, and accept the doctrine of the animal origin of man, has not for me been an easy matter.
Evolution thus is merely contingent on certain processes articulated by Darwin: variation and selection.
But sequence comparisons simply can't account for the development of complex biochemical systems any more than Darwin's comparison of simple and complex eyes told him how vision worked.
I wanted to be a scientist. My undergraduate degree is in biology, and I really did think I might go off and be some kind of a lady Darwin someplace. It turned out that I'm really awful at science and that I have no gift for actually doing science myself. But I'm very interested in others who practice science and in the stories of science.
I hope I may have succeeded in presenting to you, however imperfectly, the currents of thought due to the work of the immortal Darwin which have helped to make anthropology what it is at the present time.
I am one who believes that the world goes from the slime to the sublime. And you can take Darwin and all your philosophers and all your ontologists, and that's the direction.
It seems to me that for Darwin the pulsing of evolutionary rates was a strictly vertical phenomenon.
Darwin based his theory on generalizations that were strictly empirical. You can go out and see that organisms do vary, that variations are inherited, and that every organism is capable of increasing its numbers in sufficiently favorable circumstances.
The classics of Marxism, while fully appreciating the significance of the Darwinian theory, pointed out the errors of which Darwin was guilty. Darwin's theory, though unquestionably materialist in its main features, is not free from some serious errors.
