Quotes About Evolution

Instead, the Precambrian–Cambrian fossil record, especially in light of the Burgess Shale after Walcott, points to the geologically sudden appearance of complex and novel body plans.

FIGURE 2.7 The origin of animals. Darwinian theory (top) predicts gradual evolutionary change in contrast to the fossil evidence (bottom), which shows the abrupt appearance of the major animal groups.

Agassiz concluded that the fossil record, particularly the record of the explosion of Cambrian animal life, posed an insuperable difficulty for Darwin's theory

Earlier, in 1954, biochemist George Wald argued for the causal efficacy of chance in conjunction with vast expanses of time. As he explained, "Time is in fact the hero of the plot…. Given so much time, the impossible becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain."2

FIGURE 2.8 According to Darwinian theory, the strata beneath the Cambrian rocks should evidence many ancestral and intermediate forms. Such forms have not been found for the vast majority of animal phyla. These anticipated but missing forms are represented by the gray circles. Lines and dark circles depict fossilized representatives of phyla that have been found.

We only know who we are by trying on various versions of ourselves.

The tortured clinging to an earlier expression of The Gift very often precedes the emergence of some new version. We're aware of the dryness at the center, yes, but this aridity is usually not quite enough to propel us forward. We must first get just a whiff of the new. The surprising and intoxicating whiff of a new dharma is quite irresistible.

When [God] is moving you toward a new consciousness, you need to recognize the winds of change at once, move with them instead of clinging to what is already gone." Wow.

When [God] is moving you toward a new consciousness, you need to recognize the winds of change at once, move with them instead of clinging to what is already gone.

She was a woman who had retained the simplicity of earlier life even as she had surpassed its limitations.

So it came to pass that as he trudged from the place of blood and wrath his soul changed.

because she longer

In other words, firms don't have to be "born Agile," like Spotify. Even big, old firms can undertake an Agile transformation if they set their minds and hearts to it—and stick with it.

When I stop becoming, that's when I worry.

Originality, of course, is what occurs when something new arises out of what's already been done.

That's how it is with werewolves. You have something, then you just have the story of it.

We all become history at some point or another, right?

Names are stupid, though. Pretty soon he won't even need his.

Rightly did Darwin pin up a paper warning himself to be careful about using the words "higher" and "lower." MARY MIDGLEY

Mark Lappe once put it . . . The period once euphemistically called the Age of Miracle Drugs is dead.

The truth is much different. Bacteria literally analyze the antibiotics that they encounter and generate responses to them. They actually remake their genome in order to alter their physical form. And this solution? It is passed on to their descendants. In essence, this is the passing on of acquired characteristics, something Lamarck insisted was possible and that neo-Darwinians have ridiculed ever since.

Ironically enough, it was Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin, who first warned of bacterial resistance. He noted as early as 1929 in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology that numerous bacteria were already resistant to the drug he had discovered and by 1945 he warned in a New York Times interview that improper use of penicillin would inevitably lead to the development of resistant bacteria.

Steven Projan of Wyeth Research puts it, bacteria "are the oldest of living organisms and thus have been subject to three billion years of evolution in harsh environments and therefore have been selected to withstand chemical assault.

At such a moment, the molecules have combined into a system that is self-organized. A phase change occurs. Something more than the sum of the parts has come into being. And . . . it just happens. Like water turning into ice. And you can't predict what the system will look like after the phase change. For