Quotes About Evolution

As Einstein so eloquently put it, We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them. So

Darwin had two genuinely deep insights that are paradigm altering: 1) that the root of the plant is in fact its brain; and 2) that the plant is using sensitive, and intelligent, analysis of it surroundings to navigate through the soil.

There is an embedded assumption in evolutionary theory that the human race came from some prehuman source and through natural selection is heading someplace incredible, some peak of evolution that is our ultimate destination. This belief naturally engenders the perspective that the human achievements of the past were all right for our ancestors, but in the here-and-now are obviously primitive and hopelessly old-fashioned.

You must follow the path that opens to you and you must never stop. And it will demand that you shed your skin, over and over and over again. Your skin must be shed for that skin is not the skin of a writer; it is the skin of whatever you were before.

We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

Or as 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."10

for bacteria do not develop resistance to plant medicines. They can't. For plants have been dealing with bacteria a great deal longer than the human species has even existed, some 700 million years.

Everything in that frame is judged in terms of the human, as if we are outside the ecological matrix in which we are embedded, as if evolution ended once and for all with our emergence, with the development of our brains.

For nearly the entire history of life on this planet, 85 percent of that history in fact, life consisted solely of microorganisms. The last universal common ancestor (LUCA) for every life-form on this planet was bacterial. Again: The last universal common ancestor for every life-form on this planet was bacterial.

Symbiosis entails the unfathomably messy entanglements that constitute temporal assemblages that sometimes emerge as symbiogenetic singularities. 14

Unless mankind redesigns itself by changing our DNA through altering our genetic makeup, computer-generated robots will take over our world.

We have only to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet.

Philosophers have not kept up with modern developments in science. Particularly physics.

There is a real danger that computers will develop intelligence and take over. We urgently need to develop direct connections to the brain so that computers can add to human intelligence rather than be in opposition.

For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imaginations, we learned to talk.

We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.

One historian has remarked that "the process by which the learning of the Islamic world was discovered, appropriated, colonised by Western scholars, and made widely accessible by means of translation into Latin, the international language of scholarship ... was one of the turning-points in the intellectual evolution of mankind."8

In the animal kingdom, the predators are easy to spot. They all have their eyes in the front of their heads to facilitate an attack. Lions, tigers, and wolves are designed by nature to kill. Antelopes, deer, and rabbit all have their eyes on the side of their heads. These prey animals are designed for flight and their vision allows them to see things coming at them peripherally. In the wild there are no exceptions to this rule. With people, it was a lot harder to tell.

Over the past sixty years a rather impressive assembly of respectable taxonomists and evolutionary biologists have tried to unseat the biological species concept for a wide variety of reasons. Most of them failed, probably because Ernst Mayr is alive, adroit, and articulate at ninety-six years young as I write these words, and most critics are no match for him.

Nature is what she is - amoral and persistent.

Creationist critics often charge that evolution cannot be tested, and therefore cannot be viewed as a properly scientific subject at all. This claim is rhetorical nonsense.

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.

We have become, by the power of a glorious evolutionary accident called intelligence, the stewards of life's continuity on earth. We did not ask for this role, but we cannot abjure it. We may not be suited to it, but here we are.

We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a 'higher answer'– but none exists