Wednesday 11 February 2009

Darwin Day


Two hundred today. And about as immortal as any human can be. Rather than write some biographical balderdash, here are some of his own words. Much more eloquent.


I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars.

I love fools' experiments. I am always making them.

If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.

Man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits.

On the ordinary view of each species having been independently created, we gain no scientific explanation.

The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.

The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic.

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.

To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.
(Vide: Popper: We cannot always verify, but we can falsify)

We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universes, to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act.

We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities... still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.

What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel work of nature!

An American monkey, after getting drunk on brandy, would never touch it again, and thus is much wiser than most men.
(Why does he specify AMERICAN monkeys? P.)

We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities... still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.

Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal.

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