No form (including man) is [...] a form derived or improved with respect to some "primitive" progenitor. Man does not derive from primates (in the sa… - Giuseppe Sermonti

As quoted in La poca scienza dei libri di scienze(2013) by Paolo de Lisi.

Have you ever stopped to see seagulls suspended in the wind? If all beings on earth disappeared and only the seagulls remained, and maybe the little fish for their food, perhaps you think that from the seagulls, with the passing of millions of years, the animals that inhabit the earth and also man and perhaps even the frogs, butterflies and minnows? And even if the seagulls disappeared, can you imagine that the little fish of the sea, through gradual transformations, would give rise, at the end of time, to new seagulls or in any case to some new kind of sea bird capable of hovering in the air?

Exhilarated by his 'discovery', Darwin jotted down these sentences: 'Origin of man now proven. Metaphysics must flourish. Anyone who understood the baboon would do more for metaphysics than Locke did." Darwinian metaphysics placed all wickedness, all cruelty, all evil at its origins, in the bestial. Carrying this thought to extreme consequences which are certainly not Christian, Darwin placed the Devil at the origin, he made man a redeemed demon. "The origin of our kind," he wrote, "is the cause of our evil passions! The Devil in the form of a Baboon is our grandfather." This doctrine was cultivated and developed by Darwin's cousin, the great statistician Francis Galton. [...] «The sense of original sin» he wrote in 1865 «would not demonstrate, according to my theory, that man has fallen from a superior condition, but rather that he is rapidly recovering from an inferior one».