Evolution

Because, as an epigraph of his Treatise on Animal Generation, he wrote the celebrated ‘Omnia ex ovo’, Harvey is often credited with the concept that every living being comes from an egg. But for Harvey, ‘ovum’ denoted more than ‘egg’. It was any substance already organised to some degree — putrefying meat, rotten plants, excrement, the pupa or chrysalis of insects; in short, anything from which a living being could be seen to emerge, whether quadruped, fly, worm or plant.
— Francois Jacob, The Logic of Life (1973), 53.

But there is a question about all these kinds of beasts, which are neither tamed by man, nor spring from the earth like frogs, such as wolves and others of that sort, … as to how they could find their way to the islands after that flood which destroyed every living thing not preserved in the ark … Some, indeed, might be thought to reach islands by swimming, in case these were very near; but some islands are so remote from continental lands that it does not seem possible that any creature could reach them by swimming. It is not an incredible thing, either, that some animals may have been captured by men and taken with them to those lands which they intended to inhabit, in order that they might have the pleasure of hunting; and it can not be denied that the transfer may have been accomplished through the agency of angels, commanded or allowed to perform this labour by God.
— St Augustine of Hippo (354 – 430).

For my own part, I readily concur with you in supposing that house-doves are derived from the small blue rock-pigeon, for many reasons. In the first place, the wild stock-dove is manifestly larger than the common house-dove, against the usual rule of domestication, which generally enlarges the breed.
— Gilbert White (1720 – 1793), The Natural History of Selborne, (1789), Letter XLIV.

The connecting link between apes and men, they have generally less resemblance to the African negro than the New Zealanders, and, particularly when old, resemble the monkey more than any other human beings do. In stature, they are generally above the middle size, and their bodies bear an apish proportion to their legs, those limbs being shorter than the European’s, while the arms appear longer.
— O’Connell, James F., A residence of Eleven Years in New Holland and the Caroline Islands. Boston: B. B. Mussey, 1836, facsimile edition published by Australian National University Press, 1972, pages 90-91. [O’Connell was almost certainly not his name: he seems deliberately to muddy the waters and confuse the issue, so as to avoid identification. He was presumably an escaped convict, but he obviously had spent some time in Sydney.]

Another unpleasant class of neighbours were the native dogs or dingoes, evidently a species of wolf, or perhaps the connecting link between the wolf and the dog. These creatures were very numerous around us, and their howling or yelling at night in the neighbouring forests had a most dismal, unearthly kind of tone. They are more the figure of a Scotch colly, or sheep-dog, than any other I can think of as a comparison, but considerably larger, taller, and more gaunt-looking, with shaggy, wiry hair, and most often of a sandy colour. Their appearance is altogether wolfish, and the expression of the head especially so, nor do their ferocious habits by any means weaken the likeness.
— Louise Ann (Mrs Charles) Meredith, Notes and Sketches of New South Wales. London: John Murray, 1844, and Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1973, pages 132-133.

Bother variation, development and all such subjects! it is reasoning in a circle I believe after all. As a Botanist, I must be content to take species as they appear to be, not as they are, and still less as they were, or ought to be.
— Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817 – 1911), letter to Charles Darwin, July 1845, quoted in W. B. Turrill, Joseph Dalton Hooker, 83.

At the place where this battle was fought I saw a very odd thing, which the natives had told me about. The bones still lay there, those of the Persian dead separate from those of the Egyptians, just as they were originally divided, and I noticed that the skulls of the Persians are so thin that the merest touch of a pebble will pierce them, but those of the Egyptians, on the other hand, are so tough that it is hardly possible to break them with a blow from a stone. I was told, very credibly, that the reason was that the Egyptians shave their heads from childhood, so that the bone of the skull is indurated by the action of the sun — this is also why they hardly ever go bald, baldness being rarer in Egypt than anywhere else. This, then, explains the thickness of their skulls; and the thinness of the Persians’ skulls rests upon a similar principle: namely that they have always worn felt skull-caps to guard their heads from the sun.
— Herodotus (c. 480 BCE – 425 BCE), The Histories, Book 3, Penguin Classics, 207.

Of the accidental varieties of man which would occur among the first few and scattered inhabitants of the middle regions of Africa, some one would be better fitted than the others to bear the diseases of the country. This race would subsequently multiply, while the others would decrease, not only from their inability to sustain the attacks of disease, but from their incapacity of contending with their more vigorous neighbours. The colour of this vigorous race I take for granted, from what has already been said, would be dark.
— W. C. Wells, writing in 1818, quoted by Stephen Jay Gould (1941 – 2002), The Flamingo’s Smile, Penguin 1991, 344.

Organic life, we are told, has developed gradually from the protozoon to the philosopher, and this development, we are assured, is indubitably an advance. Unfortunately it is the philosopher, not the protozoon, who gives us this assurance.
— Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970), Mysticism and Logic, 1917.

Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability.
— Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher (1890 – 1962).

For a long time, people have wondered what would have become of scientific thought if Newton had been an apple-gatherer, Darwin a sea-captain, or Einstein a plumber (as he said he would have preferred to be). At worst, there might have been a few years’ delay in the development of the theories of gravity or relativity, and even less in the development of the theory of evolution.
— Francois Jacob, The Logic of Life (1973), pp 11-12.

Darwin puzzled over these ‘correlations of growth’ and recognised that many features may offer no direct benefit, yet still characterise large groups by their forced physiological relationship with other traits. Extreme versions of Darwinism have forgotten this subtlety and have tried to find direct adaptive advantages, often by purely speculative argument, for nearly every widespread feature.
— Stephen Jay Gould (1941 – 2002), The Flamingo’s Smile, Penguin 1991, 342.

Breeders believe that long limbs are almost always accompanied by an elongated head. Some instances of correlation are quite whimsical: thus cats with blue eyes are invariably deaf; colour and constitutional peculiarities go together, of which many remarkable cases could be given amongst animals and plants … it appears that white sheep and pigs are differently affected from coloured individuals by certain vegetable poisons. Hairless dogs have imperfect teeth … pigeons with feathered feet have skin between their toes … Hence, if man goes on selecting, and thus augmenting, any peculiarity, he will almost certainly unconsciously modify other parts of the structure, owing to the mysterious laws of the correlation of growth.
— Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 1st edition, 1859, pp. 11-12.

Whatever their specialties, all biologists deal with organisms, cells or molecules, all biologists today sooner or later have to interpret the results of their investigations in the light of the theory of evolution.
— Francois Jacob, The Logic of Life (1973), pp. 13-14.

Compared with what we think of as long periods in our everyday calculations, there must have been enormous time and considerable variations in circumstances for nature to lead the organisation of animals to the degree of complexity and development that we see today.
— Chevalier de Lamarck (1744 – 1829), Philosophie Zoologique.

In the long run, it is because of the ruggedness of the earth’s crust that the living forms on earth have been preserved. Without this geographical diversity, there would be no verdure, none of the lushness we see in the country and the forests.
— Francois Jacob, The Logic of Life (1973).

… when its whole significance dawns on you, your heart sinks into a heap of sand within you. There is a hideous fatalism about it, a ghastly and damnable reduction of beauty and intelligence, of strength and purpose, of honour and aspiration.
— George Bernard Shaw (1856 – 1950), Preface to Back to Methuselah, arguing against ‘Darwinism’, as he thought he understood it.

A camera is no more a copy of an eye than the wing of a bird is a copy of that of an insect. Each is the product of an independent evolution; and if this has brought the camera and the eye together, it is not because one has mimicked the other, but because both have had to meet the same problems, and frequently have done so in the same way.
— George Wald, ‘Eye and Camera’, Scientific American Reader (1953), 555.

The ‘walking-leaf’ and ‘walking-stick’ insects are further examples of minute imitation, the former, when resting on the foliage which forms their food, being quite indistinguishable to ordinary observation from the surrounding leaves, while the latter are perfect imitations of dead sticks … in America there is a long-horned beetle which so closely mimics a particular kind of wasp, found in the same neighbourhood, that Mr. Bates was afraid to take it out of his net with his fingers for fear of being stung.
— John Gibson, Science Gleanings in Many Fields, London, 1884.

I established the opposite view, that this history of the embryo (ontogeny) must be completed by a second, equally valuable, and closely connected branch of thought – the history of race (phylogeny). Both of these branches of evolutionary science, are, in my opinion, in the closest causal connection; this arises from the reciprocal action of the laws of heredity and adaptation... ‘ontogenesis is a brief and rapid recapitulation of phylogenesis, determined by the physiological functions of heredity (generation) and adaptation (maintenance).’
— Ernst Haeckel (1834 – 1919), Riddle of the Universe at the Close of the Nineteenth Century, 1899.

… it is equally preposterous to account for the structure of [the mistletoe], with its relations to several distinct organic beings, by the effects of external conditions, or of habit, or of the volition of the plant itself.
— Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 1st edition, 1859, 3.

In the four succeeding chapters, the most apparent and greatest difficulties on the theory will be given …
— Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 1st edition, 1859, 5.

… the view which most naturalists entertain, and which I formerly entertained — namely, that each species has been independently created — is erroneous. I am fully convinced that species are not immutable; but that those belonging to what are called the same genera are lineal descendants of some other and generally extinct species, in the same manner as the acknowledged varieties of any one species are descendants of that species. Furthermore, I am convinced that Natural Selection has been the main but not exclusive means of modification.
— Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 1st edition, 1859, 6.

The great and inherited development of the udders in cows and goats in countries where they are habitually milked, in comparison with the state of these organs in other countries, is another instance of the effect of use. Not a single domestic animal can be named which has not in some country drooping ears; and the view suggested by some authors, that the drooping is due to the disuse of the muscles of the ear, from the animals not being much alarmed by danger, seems probable.
— Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 1st edition, 1859, 11.

If a single well-verified mammal skull were to turn up in 500 million years-old rocks, our whole modern theory of evolution would be utterly destroyed. Incidentally, this is sufficient answer to the canard, put about by creationists and their journalistic fellow travellers, that the whole theory of evolution is an ‘unfalsifiable’ tautology. Ironically, it is also why creationists are so keen on the fake human footprints, which were carved during the depression to fool tourists, in the dinosaur beds of Texas.
— Richard Dawkins (1941 – ), The Blind Watchmaker, Penguin Books, 1988, 225.

Darwin’s theory, as a statement about adaptation to immediate environments (not general progress or global direction), predicts that form should follow function to establish good fit for peculiar life styles.
— Stephen Jay Gould (1941 – 2002), The Flamingo’s Smile, Penguin 1991, 25.

To the east lies New Zealand, a country dominated by its isolation which, in terms of migratory behaviour, results in a high degree of immobility. The generally mild climate also contributes to the insularity of the species found there.
— Matthieu Ricard, The Mystery of Animal Migration, Paladin, 1971, 94.

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