Quotes About Evolution

Homo sapiens [are] a tiny twig on an improbable branch of a contingent limb on a fortunate tree.

Obsolescence is a fate devoutly to be wished, lest science stagnate and die.

Current utility and historical origin are different subjects.

Geology gave us the immensity of time and taught us how little of it our own species has occupied.

I had learned that a dexterous, opposable thumb stood among the hallmarks of human success. We had maintained, even exaggerated, this important flexibility of our primate forebears, while most mammals had sacrificed it in specializing their digits. Carnivores run, stab, and scratch. My cat may manipulate me psychologically, but he'll never type or play the piano.

We live, if we still do live, in a Sea of Chaos, out of which any fucking monster can evolve.

human evolution has been determined mainly by social competition.29

No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just come out the other side. Or you don't.

To Tom, the march of technology was equivalent to the march of civilization.

When a man sits buried in a book, it is not the man that you see and know that is reading: deep down in him are antecedent generations--soldiers, pirates, martyrs, fading back to cave men. As he reads, the 'universal' book is calling to one of them.

education that stops with school stops where it is beginning.

But do you ever see butterflies hanging out with caterpillars? No you don't. They've nothing in common.

Jefferson himself believed it was the "solemn opportunity" of every generation to update the constitution "every nineteen or twenty years.

We differ from other large mammals, but not much from rodents, in the great variety of habitats we now occupy and in the population densities we have achieved. In

In Africa by 1.2 million years ago the brains of Homo rhodesiense had grown to within 6 per cent of the volume of modern humans. Around 300,000 years ago, the climate-driven brain-growth machine reached a plateau of size 11 per cent above that of today's people. Since then our brains and bodies have got smaller. The

Perhaps, as with cars, there was a law of diminishing evolutionary return, and it was no longer economical to build models with ever larger engines.

Genetic palaeontology brings clarity to a field of near-medieval confusion. The

Little changes, like small steps all along the way, bring you to a different place. One day you wake up and things are not the same anymore.

There is no arrival without a departure, and all progress is measured by how much has fallen away.

We are exactly what our history made us to be.

To get something different, you must do something different.

When we age we shed many skins: ego, arrognace, dominance, self-opionated, unreliable, pessimism, rudeness, selfish, uncaring ... Wow, it's good to be old!

Be open to the realization that who you were before and who you are now are two different people, and that what may have made you happy then, may not be the same thing that will make you happy now.

Eventually what was the superhuman becomes the common, the ordinary, the mundane.