Evolution. — The development of higher orders of animals from the lowe — Evolution

"In any developing science there are disagreements. But scientists — and here is what separates real scientists from the pseudoscientists of the school of intelligent design — always know what evidence it would take to change their minds. One thing all real scientists agree upon is the fact of evolution itself. It is a fact that we are cousins of gorillas, kangaroos, starfish, and bacteria. Evolution is as much a fact as the heat of the sun. It is not a theory, and for pity’s sake, let’s stop confusing the philosophically naive by calling it so. Evolution is a fact."

"Another curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it. I mean philosophers, social scientists, and so on. While in fact very few people understand it, actually, as it stands, even as it stood when Darwin expressed it, and even less as we now may be able to understand it in biology."

"We dont use the word evolution. We hope to walk a very thin line. On one hand we want the scientists to say this film is right and accurate, and yet we dont want to have the church picketing the film."

"The stream of tendency in which all things seek to fulfil the law of their being."

"Not only is human evolution linear in the Farscape universe, but it also follows a pre-set trajectory towards increasing complexity. The next step after original Crichton is “advanced” Crichton, distinguished by the folded indentations in his forehead, evidence of a huge brain that is literally too big for his skull. A separate paper could be written about how extraordinarily disadvantageous such a variation would be, but what is equally interesting is the premise of the episode that states that “advanced” Crichton was “evolved” from original Crichton’s DNA. The implicit argument here is that humanity’s evolutionary trajectory is preset. Human beings will evolve in a particular way, regardless of anything else around them."

"Gould discusses iconographies like the “great chain of being” and the “march of progress” as influencing our perceptions of evolution. Today “family tree”-style pictures are beginning to replace the traditional image of the “march of progress” in biology textbooks. However, outside academia, there are still countless visual representations of evolution that maintain the fiction that evolution inevitably follows a certain predetermined linear progression and that that trajectory moves towards humanoid bodies and human or superhuman brains. Science fiction movies, TV shows, and comic books are powerful iconographies in today’s society, continuing to perpetuate the myth of trajectory-based evolution. According to the sci-fi genre, evolution follows an internal “blueprint,” a preset trajectory that takes organisms from simplicity to complexity for complexity’s sake."