“Mr. Darwin labours to show, and with no small success, that all true classification in zoology and botany is, in fact, genealogical, and that community of descent is the hidden bond which naturalists have been unconsciously seeking, while they often imagined that they were looking for some unknown plan of creation.”

Source: The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man (1863), Ch.21, p. 412

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Charles Lyell103

British lawyer and geologist 1797–1875

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“Now what is science? …it is before all a classification, a manner of bringing together facts which appearances separate, though they are bound together by some natural and hidden kinship. Science, in other words, is a system of relations. …it is in relations alone that objectivity must be sought. …it is relations alone which can be regarded as objective.
External objects… are really objects and not fleeting and fugitive appearances, because they are not only groups of sensations, but groups cemented by a constant bond. It is this bond, and this bond alone, which is the object in itself, and this bond is a relation.”

Henri Poincaré book The Value of Science

Source: The Value of Science (1905), Ch. 11: Science and Reality

“The Sizemores are the laughing stock of wannabee genealogy. They claim Cherokee descent, but their paper trail shows them to be white.”

Lisa Alther (1944) Novelist

Kinfolks

“The naturalists, you know, distribute the history of nature into three kingdoms or departments: zoology, botany, mineralogy. Ideology, or mind, however, occupies so much space in the field of science, that we might perhaps erect it into a fourth kingdom or department. But inasmuch as it makes a part of the animal construction only, it would be more proper to subdivide zoology into physical and moral.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Thomas Jefferson, Letter (24 Mar 1824) to Mr. Woodward. Collected in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson: Correspondence (1854), 339.
Posthumous publications, On botany

“If we compare the antiquity and illustrious descent of the dynasties which have ruled, and some which continue to rule, the small sovereignties of Rajasthan, with many of celebrity in Europe, superiority will often attach to the Rajput.”

James Tod (1782–1835) 1782-1835, English officer of the British East India Company and an Oriental scholar

Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan by James Tod

“We have too long supposed that the Unknown mysterium tremendum et fascinosum of religion was outside us, when in fact that Unknown, although ego-alien or unconscious, was all the while within us: the alleged “supernatural” is the human “subconscious.””

Weston La Barre (1911–1996) anthropologist

Source: Hallucinogens and the Shamanic Origins of Religion (1972), p. 261

“I am convinced that if all men were to live as simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown. These take place only in communities where some have got more than is sufficient while others have not enough.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

Source: Walden & Civil Disobedience

“A fact will often show poor and plain in contrast to the leapings of imagination.”

Marion L. Starkey (1901–1991) American historian & writer

Source: The Devil in Massachusetts: A Modern Enquiry into the Salem Witch Trials (1949), Chapter 17, “Eight Firebrands of Hell” (p. 205)

“Physiologic facts concerning the origin of species in nature were unknown in the time of Darwin... The experience of the breeders was quite inadequate to the use which Darwin made of it. It was neither scientific, nor critically accurate. Laws of variation were barely conjectured; the different types of variability were only imperfectly distinguished. The breeders' conception was fairly sufficient for practical purposes, but science needed a clear understanding of the factors in the general process of variation. Repeatedly Darwin tried to formulate these causes, but the evidence available did not meet his requirements.
Quetelet's law of variation had not yet been published. Mendel's claim of hereditary units for the explanation of certain laws of hybrids discovered by him, was not yet made. The clear distinction between spontaneous and sudden changes, as compared with the ever-present fluctuating variations, is only of late coming into recognition by agriculturists. Innumerable minor points which go to elucidate the breeders' experience, and with which we are now quite familiar, were unknown in Darwin's time. No wonder that he made mistakes, and laid stress on modes of descent, which have since been proved to be of minor importance or even of doubtful validity.”

Hugo De Vries (1848–1935) Dutch botanist

Species and Varieties: Their Origin by Mutation (1904), The Open Court Publishing Company, Chicago, p. 5-6

“While the geneticists were disproving many of Darwin's ideas, the palaeontologists were determining the actual historical facts of evolution. …they were able to verify the law of succession, first explicitly given by Darwin's colleague Wallace. "Every species has come into existence coincident, both in time and space, with a pre-existing closely allied species."”

J. B. S. Haldane book The Causes of Evolution

Introduction, pp.20-21.
The Causes of Evolution (1932)

“After much consideration and many inquiries, I determined, in 1885, on experimenting with sweet peas, which were suggested to me both by Sir Joseph Hooker and by Mr. Darwin. …The result clearly proved Regression; the mean Filial deviation was only one-third that of the parental one, and the experiments all concurred. The formula that expresses the descent from one generation of a people to the next, showed that the generations would be identical if this kind of Regression was allowed for.”

Francis Galton (1822–1911) British polymath: geographer, statistician, pioneer in eugenics

Source: Memories of My Life (1908), Ch. XX Heredity (1909 ed.)

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