Quotes About Evolution

published in 1980, John McPhee noted that even then one American geologist in eight still didn't believe in plate tectonics. Today

Of the billions and billions of species of living thing that have existed since the dawn of time, most—99.99

Kazakhstan, it turns out, was once attached to Norway and New England.

It really doesn't pay to go back and look again at the things that once delighted you, because it's unlikely they will delight you now.

By the middle of the nineteenth century most learned people thought the Earth was at least a few million years old, perhaps even some tens of millions years old, but probably not more than that. So

It would be hard to believe that the continuous movement of tectonic plates has no effect on the development of life on earth.

Over time, each of these principal groupings split into further subdivisions, of which some prospered and some faltered. Anapsids gave rise to the turtles, which for a time, perhaps a touch improbably, appeared poised to predominate as the planet's most advanced and deadly species, before an evolutionary lurch let them settle for durability rather than dominance.

In the early Tertiary, if you were the size of a bobcat you could be king.

Look at a globe and what you are seeing really is a snapshot of the continents as they have been for just one-tenth of 1 percent of the Earth's history.

stromatolites—a kind of living rock made by billions and billions of microscopic cyanobacteria. The tiny respirations of these organisms over millions of years largely created Earth's oxygen-rich atmosphere, paving the way for more complex living things.

The Murchison meteorite was found to be 4.5 billion years old, and it was studded with amino acids—seventy-four types in all, eight of which are involved in the formation of earthly proteins.

As Davies puts it, "If everything needs everything else, how did the community of molecules ever arise in the first place?

Without doubt, the moose is the most improbable, endearingly hopeless creature ever to live in the wilds. Every bit of it—its spindly legs, its chronically puzzled expression, its comical oven-mitt antlers—looks like some droll evolutionary joke. It is wondrously ungainly: it runs as if its legs have never been introduced to each other. Above all, what distinguishes the moose is its almost boundless lack of intelligence.

if you make monomers wet they don't turn into polymers—except when creating life on the Earth.

Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so.

There is actually a certain value in not finding anything," he said. "It helps cosmologists to work out the rate at which galaxies are evolving.

litres for Neandertals versus 1.4 for modern people, according to one calculation. This is more than the difference between modern Homo sapiens and late Homo erectus, a species we are happy to regard as barely human. The argument put forward is that although our brains were smaller, they were somehow more efficient. I believe I speak the truth when I observe that nowhere else in human evolution is such an argument made.

As Siddhartha Mukherjee observed in The Gene: An Intimate History, humans don't actually reproduce at all.8 Geckos reproduce; we recombine.

All over the inchoate solar system, the same was happening. Colliding dust grains formed larger and larger clumps. Eventually the clumps grew large enough to be called planetesimals.

like physics before it," Woese wrote, "has moved to a level where the objects of interest and their interactions often cannot be perceived through direct observation." In

We flatter ourselves. Most of the real diversity in evolution has been small-scale. We large things are just flukes—an interesting side branch.

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. 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.

To be here now, alive in the twenty-first century and smart enough to know it, you also had to be the beneficiary of an extraordinary string of biological good fortune.

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.