Quotes About Evolution

Of the billions and billions of species of living things that have existed since the dawn of time, most—99.99 percent, it has been suggested—are no longer around. Life on Earth, you see, is not only brief but dismayingly tenuous. It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.

For anyone of a rational disposition, fashion is often nearly impossible to fathom. Throughout many periods of history—perhaps most—it can seem as if the whole impulse of fashion has been to look maximally ridiculous. If one could be maximally uncomfortable as well, the triumph was all the greater.

As Jablonski has written, "The loss of most of our body hair and the gain of the ability to dissipate excess body heat through eccrine sweating helped to make possible the dramatic enlargement of our most temperature-sensitive organ, the brain." That, she says, is how sweat helped to make you brainy.

Cancer is the price we pay for evolution.

The first pacemaker was about the size of a pack of cigarettes. Today's are no bigger than one American quarter and can last up to ten years.

as in the Old English word burh (place), which became variously burgh as in Edinburgh, borough as in Gainsborough, brough as in Middlesbrough, and bury as in Canterbury.

A woman endows all her children with her mitochondria, but only her daughters have the mechanism to pass it onward to future generations.

You look at the modern humans that a lot of us have slept with and it is hardly a surprise if a Neanderthal maiden or two might have twinkled by the campfire light.

Bathroom is first noted in 1836, though toilet paper, intriguingly, isn't found before 1880.

85 percent of the 30,000 Anglo-Saxon words died out under the influence of the Danes and Normans. That means that only about 4,500 Old English words survived—about 1 percent of the total number of words in the Oxford English Dictionary. And yet those surviving words are among the most fundamental words in English: man, wife, child, brother, sister, live, fight, love, drink, sleep, eat, house, and so on.

It is a cherishable irony that a language that succeeded almost by stealth, treated for centuries as the inadequate and second-rate tongue of peasants, should one day become the most important and successful language in the world.

The universal tree of life on Earth might actually be a forest.

some birds and marine mammals are able to switch off one half of their brain at a time, so that one half remains alert while the other is snoozing.

DNA passes on information with extraordinary fidelity. It makes only about one error per every billion letters copied. Still, because your cells divide so much, that is about three errors, or mutations, per cell division. Most of those mutations the body can ignore, but just occasionally they have lasting significance. That is evolution.

Every bit of penicillin made since that day is descended from that single random cantaloupe

we are all now descended from a single mitochondrial ancestor – a woman who lived in Africa about 200,000 years ago. You may have heard her referred to as Mitochondrial Eve. She is, in a sense, mother of us all.

One of the undoubted virtues of English is that it is a fluid and democratic language in which meanings shift and change in response to the pressures of common usage rather than the dictates of committees. It is a natural process that has been going on for centuries. To interfere with that process is arguably both arrogant and futile, since clearly the weight of usage will push new meanings into currency no matter how many authorities hurl themselves into the path of change.

Or look at the old money, with its florins and half crowns and thrupenny bits, and imagine what it was like in the days when people had to add tuppence ha'penny to one shilling four nibblings or whatever. With

The reason for this is that the rules of English grammar were originally modeled on those of Latin, which in the seventeenth century was considered the purest and most admirable of tongues. That it may be. But it is also quite clearly another language altogether. Imposing Latin rules on English structure is a little like trying to play baseball in ice skates.

Almost no one ever notices it, but our thumbs are on sideways. The thumbnail faces away from the rest of the fingers.

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.

It hardly needs pointing out that for most of history the focus of medicine has been to make sick people better, but now increasingly doctors devote their energies to trying to head off problems before they even arise, through programmes of screening and the like, and that changes the dynamics of care entirely.

Remarkably, Darwin hadn't finished with barnacles yet. Three years later he produced a 684-page study of sessile cirripedes and a more modest companion work on the barnacle fossils not mentioned in the first work. "I hate a barnacle as no man ever did before," he declared upon the conclusion of the work, and it is hard not to sympathize.

we know more about how ancient Greeks and Romans sat or reclined than we do about the English of eight hundred years ago.