Quotes About Evolution

Do we eventually become what we are originally meant to be?

For those cities that were great in earlier times must have now become small, and those that were great in my time were small in the time before.… Man's good fortune never abides in the same place.

She wanted Kip to know her only in the present, a person perhaps more flawed or more compassionate or harder or more obsessed than the girl or young woman she had been then.

our way up a narrowing cut. It was a different atmosphere

Menschen im Alter zwischen zwanzig und dreißig Jahren sind damit beschäftigt, ein anderer zu werden.

Design in nature is but a concatenation of accidents, culled by natural selection until the result is so beautiful or effective as to seem a miracle of purpose.

Darwin called such a process artificial, as opposed to natural, selection, but from the flower's point of view, this is a distinction without a difference: individual plants in which a trait desired by either bees or Turks occurred wound up with more offspring.

There is every reason to believe that corn has succeeded in domesticating us.

cultural change occurs whenever a new meme is introduced and catches on. It might be romanticism or double-entry book-keeping, chaos theory or Pokemon. So where in the world do new memes come from? sometimes they spring full-blown from the brains of artists or scientists, advertising copywriters or teenagers. often a process of mutation is involved in the creation of a new meme, in much the same way that mutations in natural environment can lead to useful new genetic traits.

The short, unhappy life of a corn-fed feedlot steer represents the ultimate triumph of industrial thinking over the logic of evolution.

An individual human existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually, the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.

For great many species today, "fitness" means the ability to get along in a world in which humankind has become the most powerful evolutionary force.

Wrangham cites several studies indicating that in fact humans don't do well on raw food: they can't maintain their body weight, and half of the women on a raw-food regimen stop menstruating. Devotees of raw food rely heavily on juicers and blenders, because otherwise they would have to spend as much time chewing as the chimps do. It is difficult, if not impossible, to extract sufficient energy from unprocessed plant matter to power a body with such a big, hungry brain.

Scientists recently discovered a handful of species that produce caffeine in their nectar, which is the last place you would expect a plant to serve up a poisonous beverage. These plants have discovered that they can attract pollinators by offering them a small shot of caffeine; even better, that caffeine has been shown to sharpen the memories of bees, making them more faithful, efficient, and hardworking pollinators. Pretty much what caffeine does for us.

Cooking is no longer obligatory, and that marks a shift in human history, one whose full implications we're just beginning to reckon.

why our usual perception of the world is "limited to what is biologically or socially useful"; our brains evolved to admit to our awareness only the "measly trickle" of information required for our survival and no more.

wherever the apple tree goes, its offspring propose so many different variations on what it means to be an apple -- at least five per apple, several thousand per tree -- that a couple of these novelties are almost bound to have whatever qualities it takes to prosper in the tree's adopted home.

Howlett speculated that the human cannabinoid system evolved to help us endure (and selectively forget) the routine slings and arrows of life "so that we can get up in the morning and do it all over again." It is the brain's own drug for coping with the human condition.

Natural selection has designed flowers to communicate with other species, deploying an astonishing array of devices—visual, olfactory, and tactile—to get the attention of specific insects and birds and even certain mammals.

Plants are so unlike people that it's very difficult for us to appreciate fully their complexity and sophistication. Yet plants have been evolving much, much longer than we have

Evolution doesn't depend on will or intention to work; it is, almost by definition, an unconscious, unwilled process.

Claude Lévi-Strauss described the work of civilization as the process of transforming the raw into the cooked—nature into culture.

Researchers have found that people (and animals) presented with large portions will eat up to 30 percent more than they could otherwise. Human appetite, it turns out, is surprisingly elastic, which makes excellent evolutionary sense: It behooved our hunter gatherer ancestors to feast whenever the opportunity presented itself, allowing them to build up reserves of fat against future famine.

A mouse is the size of a mouse for a good reason, and a mouse that was the size of an elephant wouldn't do very well.