Quote

We are glorious accidents of an unpredictable process with no drive to complexity, not the expected results of evolutionary principles that yearn to produce a creature capable of understanding the mode of its own necessary construction.

— Stephen Jay Gould

Sentiment: POSITIVE

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✓Similar Perspectives

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.

— Richard Dawkins

Evolution is an indispensable component of any satisfying explanation of our psychology.

— Steven Pinker

The manner in which life constructs itself must be dealing with some other principle which we've failed to identify.

— Simon Conway Morris

The proof of evolution lies in those adaptations that arise from improbable foundations.

— Stephen Jay Gould

Theories of evolution must provide for the creative acts which brought such theories into existence.

— Michael Polanyi

Nature can always be more complicated than we imagine.

— Harold Urey

All living things are gnarly, in that they inevitably do things that are much more complex than one might have expected.

— Rudy Rucker

Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability.

— Ronald Fisher

We need to separate the process of evolution - which is, indeed, a self-serving process - and the actual motivations of animals.

— Frans de Waal

✗Opposing Perspectives

We, as extremely complex creatures, desperately need to know this story of how the universe creates complexity and why complexity means vulnerability and fragility.

— David Christian