Giuseppe Sermonti

Giuseppe Sermonti (October 4, 1925 – December 16, 2018) was an Italian Roman Catholic biologist and essayist.

Giuseppe Sermonti

Quotes

• No form (including man) is [...] a form derived or improved with respect to some "primitive" progenitor. Man does not derive from primates (in the same way that birds do not derive from reptiles) except in the deceptive sense in which any form can be considered derived "from" the larger group to which it belongs. […] We have given names to the pre-human forms. We called them man-apes, subhumans, or brutes. But did they ever exist, or rather don't they belong to a mythology that has now disappeared?
  • As quoted in La poca scienza dei libri di scienze(2013) by Paolo de Lisi.

• 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».
  • As quoted in Il Tao della biologia: saggio sulla comparsa dell'uomo (2015), Lindau, Turin,p. 39. ISBN 9788867084111

• 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?
  • As quoted in Le forme della vita (1981), Armando editore.