Quotes About Evolution

Without change something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.

I am for who i was in the beginning but now is present and i exist in the future.

That is the consolation of a little mind; you have the fun of changing it without impeding the progress of mankind.

In 1986 a typical salesman subscribed to Time or perhaps Playboy, played golf, and sold corporate and government bonds. By 1994 that same salesman read Soldier of Fortune and Guns and Ammo, shot doves, and sold leveraged-indexed-inverse-floating-dual-currency structured notes. This was no coincidence.

Don't worry about getting perfect, just keep getting better.

It is probably not a joke that computer games, spectator sports, television violence fantasies, and weekend hunting and fishing expeditions are the necessary transformations of outmoded but undiminished vestigial drives and skills that humans still carry with them. But is the creation of a menu of imaginative diversions our only recourse to the unremitting sway of an obsolete "hunter-gatherer" heritage?

Culture is nothing but a set of successful patterns of behaviour grounded in our struggle to survive.

Actually, no. In The Abyss the alien creatures come from space. The film makes them out to be a nicer version of humans. They're supposed to have a moral message. The main difference, though, is that those aliens aren't interested in toppling us from our throne at the top of terrestrial evolution, which is what any intelligent species that had developed in parallel to us and that shared our planet would want to do.

They're telling us is that this is their planet - which they've been ruling for a hundred and eighty million years, maybe more. They're telling us they've got genetic memory, the magnetic field is their compass, and they're everywhere where there's water. They want us to know that we're in the here and now, whereas they're everywhere and for ever. Those are the facts. It's all in the message, and it says a lot.

Let's imagine I happen to be writing some sort of truth here. By the time you read this, I might have changed my mind. Ten years from now, I would likely put it differently. By then I may regret that I wrote this. And regardless of how I feel then, I'll bet that if you reread my book twenty years from now, you'll have changed, so the book will have changed, too. So much for changeless truth.

If we wait for correct ideas to save us—theological or otherwise—we'll never be saved, even from ourselves. Why? Because we can never have a fully correct idea. Why? Because however we label ourselves, we are still only half-evolved primates in two or more minds and multiple moods.

The internet has added a new layer, not created a revolutionary break.

Some people have twenty years of experience, while others have one year of experience twenty times.

In this manner, Lenski arrives at the following causal chain: the more powerful the technology and the more detailed the division of labour, the greater the surplus of goods and services produced; the greater the surplus, the more goods and services will be distributed on the basis of power. To put it in slightly different terms, the social evolutionary process leads to greater inequality.

I'm thrilled with the person I'm becoming.

Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.

One thing is sure. We have to do something. We have to do the best we know how at the moment... If it doesn't turn out right, we can modify it as we go along.

It takes a long time to bring the past up to the present.

You sometimes find something good in the lunatic fringe. In fact, we have got as part of our social and economic government today a whole lot of things which in my boyhood were considered lunatic fringe, and yet they are now part of everyday life.

There are very few things we can know beforehand. We will try and if we find we are wrong, we will have to change.

The history of life unfolds over a time span so vast it boggles the imagination. I, for one, can draw no meaning from a million years, let alone a billion, and prefer a geographical metric. Let 1 millimeter, the thickness of a dime, stand for 1 year. Then 1 meter makes a millennium, 1 kilometer 1 million years, and the age of the earth (about 4.5 billion years) spans 4,500 kilometers, a little more than the distance between Miami and Seattle. As

You're an old-timer if you can remember when setting the world on fire was a figure of speech.

Perhaps nothing has changed in the course of history as much as historians.

There's actually a lot of evidence in primates and other animals that they return favors.