Quotes About Evolution

It is only the brevity of lifetimes that keeps us from appreciating the changes.

On a cooler sun on a primordial earth: I later learned that biologists, when they are feeling jocose, refer to this as the 'Chinese Resaturant Problem'--because we has a dim sun.

Proteins can't exist without DNA and DNA has no purpose without proteins. Are we to assume, then, that they arose simultaneously with the purpose of supporting each other? If so: wow. And

Life emerged so swiftly, in fact, that some authorities think it must have had help—perhaps a good deal of help.

Each mobile phone today – indeed, each washing machine – has more computing power than NASA could deploy on the Apollo programme.

For 2 billion years this is all the life there was on earth, but in that time the stromatolites raised the oxygen level in the atmosphere to 20 percent—enough to allow the development of other, more complex life-forms: me, for instance. My gratitude was real.

Since the dawn of time, several billion human (or humanlike) beings have lived, each contributing a little genetic variability to the total human stock.

Our seams don't burst, we don't spontaneously sprout leaks," says Nina Jablonski, professor of anthropology at Penn State University, who is the doyenne of all things cutaneous.

In just 200 million years, possibly less, the Earth was essentially formed, though still molten and subject to constant bombardment from all the debris that remained floating about. At

The animals we raise for food today are eaten not because they are notably delectable or nutritious or a pleasure to be around, but because they were the ones first domesticated in the Stone Age.

We started this chapter with three points: life wants to be; life doesn't always want to be much; life from time to time goes extinct. To this we may add a fourth: life goes on. And often, as we shall see, it goes on in ways that are decidedly amazing.

If you could fly backwards into the past at the rate of one year per second, it would take you about half an hour to reach the time of Christ, and a little over three weeks to get back to the beginnings of human life. But it would take you twenty years to reach the dawn of the Cambrian period.

Indeed, it has been suggested that there isn't a single bit of any of us – not so much as a stray molecule8 – that was part of us nine years ago. It may not feel like it, but at the cellular level we are all youngsters.

It is fairly amazing to reflect that at the beginning of the twentieth century, and for some years beyond, the best scientific minds in the world couldn't actually tell you, in any meaningful way, where babies came from.

It's a slightly humbling thought that the genes you carry are immensely ancient and possibly—so far anyway—eternal. You will die and fade away, but your genes will go on and on so long as you and your descendants continue to produce offspring.

The remote valley of Lake Turkana (formerly Lake Rudolf) in Kenya is now one of the world's most productive sites for early human remains

There is no question that a Neanderthal could easily beat us up. So, too, presumably could their women, which may be why we are only 2 percent Neanderthal instead of 50 percent. Those bitches were too scary for us. Nearby

Behaviorally modern human beings—that is, people who can speak and make art and organize complex activities—have existed for only about 0.0001 percent of Earth's history

well over a million years ago, some new, comparatively modern, upright beings left Africa and boldly spread out across much of the globe.

Felipe Fernández-Armesto, at least thirty-eight theories have been put forward to explain why people took to living in communities: that they were driven to it by climatic change, or by a wish to stay near their dead, or by a powerful desire to brew and drink beer, which could only be indulged by staying in one place.

And it is surely astounding to reflect that not once in the three billion years since life began has your personal line of descent been broken.

Trinil skullcap.

remote in time from us the Cambrian outburst was. If you could fly backwards into the past at the rate of one year per second, it would take you about half an hour to reach the time of Christ, and a little over three weeks to get back to the beginnings of human life. But it would take you twenty years to reach the dawn of the Cambrian period. It was, in other words, an extremely long time ago and the world was a very different

Oxygen levels in the Devonian and Carboniferous periods, when terrestrial life first bloomed, were as high as 35 percent (as opposed to nearer 20 percent now). This allowed animals to grow remarkably large remarkably quickly.