Quotes About Evolution

3.18-million-year-old australopithecine found at Hadar in Ethiopia in 1974 by a team led by Donald Johanson. Formally known as A.L.

At all events, rather less is known about Lucy than is generally supposed. It isn't even actually known that she was a female.

For almost four billion years life had dawdled along without any detectable ambitions in the direction of complexity, and then suddenly, in the space of just five or ten million years, it had created all the basic body designs still in use today.

he sees our lineal success as a fortunate fluke: "Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay." Gould

assumed to be australopithecines because there are no other known candidates. I

They are, reluctantly or enthusiastically, accepting the idea that humans are as much an accident of nature as a product of orderly development." But

In Australia and the Americas," says Tim Flannery, "the animals probably didn't know enough to run away.

One reason life took so long to grow complex was that the world had to wait until the simpler organisms had oxygenated the atmosphere sufficiently

Bipedalism is a demanding and risky strategy.

They maintain their own DNA. They reproduce at a different time from their host cell. They look like bacteria, divide like bacteria, and sometimes respond to antibiotics in the way bacteria do.

vanity as humans that we tend to think of evolution as a process that, in effect, was programmed to produce us.

Homo erectus was the first to hunt, the first to use fire, the first to fashion complex tools, the first to leave evidence of campsites, the first to look after the weak and frail.

It occurred to me that Australians are so surrounded with danger that they have evolved an entirely new vocabulary to deal with it.

One reason chimps can't talk is that they appear to lack the ability to make subtle shapes with tongue and lips to form complex sounds.

we now know that most viruses infect only bacterial cells and have no effect on us at all. Of the hundreds of thousands of viruses reasonably supposed to exist, just 586 species are known to infect mammals, and of these only 263 affect humans.

the slight evolutionary change that pushed man's larynx deeper into his throat, and thus made choking a possibility, also brought with it the possibility of sophisticated, well-articulated speech.

Before the shift house was pronounced "hoose" (it still is in Scotland), mode was pronounced "mood," and home rhymed with "gloom," which is why Domesday Book is pronounced and sometimes called Doomsday. (The word has nothing to do with the modern word doom, incidentally. It is related to the domes- in domestic.)

Above all, the adoption of a narrower pelvis to accommodate our new gait brought a huge amount of pain and danger to women in childbirth. Until recent times, no other animal on Earth was more likely to die in childbirth than a human, and perhaps none even now suffers as much. —

You are the product of three billion years of evolutionary tweaks.

extensor pollicis brevis, the flexor pollicis longus, and the first volar interosseous of Henle.* Working together, they allow us to grasp and manipulate tools with sureness and delicacy. You might never have heard of them, but these three small muscles are at the heart of human civilization. Take them away and our greatest collective achievement might be maneuvering ants out of their nests with sticks.

We had remained friends in a kind of theoretical sense, but our paths had diverged wildly.

Some varieties of Smokies salamander haven't even evolved lungs. (They breathe through their skin.) Most salamanders are tiny, only an inch or two long, but the rare and startlingly ugly hellbender salamander can attain lengths of over two feet.

As late as 1930, America had 181,000 refrigerated railway cars, all cooled with ice.

Our ears are built for a quiet world. Evolution did not foresee that one day humans would insert plastic buds in their ears and subject their eardrums to a hundred decibels of melodic roar across a span of millimeters.