Quotes About Evolution

Sometimes it takes me days or weeks to get something clear in my head on what I want to do. Everything is in steps. One thing leads to another.

Ljubav se stalno menja zato što se mi stalno menjamo. Stoga romanti?na ljubav, sama po sebi, donosi nestabilnost. ?ini nas nezadovoljnim onim što imamo time što nas uvek usmerava ka ne?emu što ne posedujemo u potpunosti, ili posedujemo u nedovoljnoj meri, ili pak u ?ije smo posedovanje suviše sigurni.

What allows us to step into the future is stepping back into the past.

We ought to call ourselves Homo clamorans . Noisemaking man.

People change, they end up having nothing to say to each other, even if they were were best friends a year earlier.

People change, they end up having nothing to say to each other, even if they were were best friends a year earlier. Amy in Tape.

New York in the 1880's was already a city that seemed to have made up its mind that whatever existed was dispensable and replaceable

His methods did not only develop what Argyris and Schon have called "single-loop learning," in which an organization learns to correct its actions so as to carry on its current policies and fulfill its current objectives, but "double-loop learning," in which the organization's policies, objectives, and behavioral norms are modified.11

Agassiz explained his reasons for doubting the creative power of natural selection. Small-scale variations, he argued, had never produced a "specific difference" (i.e., a difference in species). Meanwhile, large-scale variations, whether achieved gradually or suddenly, inevitably resulted in sterility or death. As he put it, "It is a matter of fact that extreme variations finally degenerate or become sterile; like monstrosities they die out.

If Darwin is right, Agassiz argued, then we should find not just one or a few missing links, but innumerable links shading almost imperceptibly from alleged ancestors to presumed descendants. Geologists, however, had found no such myriad of transitional forms leading to the Cambrian fauna. Instead, the stratigraphic column seemed to document the abrupt appearance of the earliest animals. Agassiz

Darwin's picture of the history of life "contradict[ed] what the animal forms buried in the rocky strata of our earth tell us of their own introduction and succession upon the surface of the globe.

Darwin's mechanism of natural selection and random variation necessarily required a lot of time to generate wholly novel organisms, creating a dilemma that Agassiz was keen to expose.

documenting Darwin's picture of the history of life. If Darwin is right, Agassiz argued, then we should find not just one or a few missing links, but innumerable links shading almost imperceptibly from alleged ancestors to presumed descendants.

Geologists, however, had found no such myriad of transitional forms leading to the Cambrian fauna. Instead, the stratigraphic column seemed to document the abrupt appearance of the earliest animals.

Indeed, Walcott's discovery turned Darwin's anticipated bottom-up—or small changes first, big changes later—pattern on its head.

Yet the Precambrian strata of his day showed no signs of providing any obvious transitional forms, much less a well-articulated bottom-up pattern of animals representing lower taxa proliferating into forms exemplifying higher and higher taxonomic categories.

Yet we would not expect the neo-Darwinian mechanism of natural selection acting on random genetic mutations to produce the top-down pattern that we observe in the history of life following the Cambrian explosion.

The question that Darwin's early critics posed was this: How could he reconcile his theory of gradual evolution with a fossil record so discontinuous that it had given rise to the names of the major distinct periods of geological time, particularly when the first animal forms seemed to spring into existence during the Cambrian as if from nowhere?

there is still a mystery to speculate about: Why and how did many animals begin to have hard parts—skeletons of sorts—with apparent suddenness around the beginning of the Cambrian?"24

The relative suddenness of the Cambrian explosion, even on the earlier measure of its duration, had already raised serious questions about the adequacy of the neo-Darwinian mechanism; consequently, it had also raised questions about whether a Darwinian understanding of the history of life could be reconciled with the Cambrian and Precambrian fossil record.

In other words, they have failed to find the paleontological equivalent of the numerous finely graded intermediate colors (Pendleton blue, dusty rose, gun barrel gray, magenta, etc.) that interior designers covet.

that there are no biological forms left to discover. He means, rather, that we have good reason to conclude that such discoveries will not alter the largely discontinuous pattern that has emerged.

with the Darwinian view for yet another reason. The Chengjiang discoveries intensify the top-down pattern of appearance

with the Darwinian view for yet another reason. The Chengjiang discoveries intensify the top-down pattern of appearance in which individual representatives of the higher taxonomic categories (phyla, subphyla, and classes) appear and only later diversify into the lower taxonomic categories (families, genera, and species).