Daily Inspiration Quote by John Ambrose Fleming

To call evolution "baseless" is less a scientific critique than a defensive posture from an older intellectual order watching its authority slip. John Ambrose Fleming wasn’t a pulp polemicist; he was a serious inventor who helped build the electrical age. That’s what makes the line culturally revealing: it shows how technical brilliance in one domain can harden into certainty in another, especially when the other domain threatens metaphysical comfort.

"Incredible" does double duty. On the surface, it means implausible. Underneath, it signals moral and theological discomfort: a world explained by impersonal selection feels not just unlikely but indecent, as if it strips human life of sponsorship. Fleming’s phrasing isn’t the careful language of empirical dispute (no competing data, no alternative mechanism). It’s courtroom language: the case is dismissed as lacking foundation. That choice telegraphs intent. He’s not entering a debate; he’s trying to foreclose it.

The context matters. Fleming lived through Darwin’s aftershocks and into the early 20th century, when evolution was being re-litigated in public life and entangled with anxiety about modernity, industrialization, and secularization. A figure associated with progress in machines could still recoil from progress in ideas about origins because those ideas rearranged the hierarchy of meaning. The quote works, rhetorically, because it borrows the authority of engineering certainty - solid, practical, no-nonsense - and aims it at a theory that, in everyday imagination, can sound abstract and sprawling. It’s a sound bite designed to make doubt feel like common sense.