Quotes About Evolution

They became upright and taught themselves the use of tools, domesticated other animals, plants and fire, and devised language. The ash of stellar alchemy was now emerging into consciousness. At an ever-accelerating pace, it invented writing, cities, art and science, and sent spaceships to the planets and the stars. These are some of the things that hydrogen atoms do, given fifteen billion years of cosmic evolution.

If we go far enough back, any two people on Earth have a common ancestor.

Those are some of the things that molecules do, given four billion years of evolution

Man is a transitional animal. He is not the climax of creation.

We are rendering many species extinct; we may even succeed in destroying ourselves. But this is nothing new for the Earth. Humans would then be just the latest in a long sequence of upstart species that arrive on-stage, make some alterations in the scenery, kill off some of the cast, and then themselves exit stage-left forever. New players appear in the next act. The Earth abides. It has seen all this before.

The old exhortations to nationalist fervor and jingoist pride have begun to lose their appeal. Perhaps because of rising standards of living, children are being treated better worldwide. In only a few decades, sweeping global changes have begun to move in precisely the directions needed for human survival. A new consciousness is developing which recognizes that we are one species.

The chance of receiving a signal from a civilization exactly as advanced as we are should be minuscule. If they were even a little behind us, they would lack the technological capability to communicate with us at all. So the most likely signal would come from a civilization much more advanced.

The fossil record implies trial and error, an inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with an efficient Great Designer.

almost every species that has ever existed is extinct; extinction is the rule, survival is the exception.

the future belongs to those societies that treat new ideas as delicate, fragile and immensely valuable pathways to the future.

These are some of the things that hydrogen atoms do, given fifteen billion years of cosmic evolution.

Part of the resistance to Darwin and Wallace derives from our difficulty in imagining the passage of the millennia, much less the aeons. What does seventy million years mean to beings who live only one-millionth as long? We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.

It is precisely our plasticity, our long childhood, that prevents a slavish adherence to genetically programmed behavior in human beings more than in any other species.

So far as I know, childbirth is generally painful in only one of the millions of species on Earth: human beings. This must be a consequence of the recent and continuing increase in cranial volume... Childbirth is painful because the evolution of the human skull has been spectacularly fast and recent.

I would rather be a transformed ape than a degenerate son of Adam.

As science advances, there seems to be less and less for God to do. It's a big universe, of course, so He, She, or It, could be profitably employed in many places. But what has clearly been happening is that evolving before our eyes has been a God of the Gaps; that is, whatever it is we cannot explain lately is attributed to God. And then after a while, we explain it, and so that's no longer God's realm.

They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival. I believe our future depends on how well we know this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky.

The tragedy of the human species is it has evolved the capacity of foresight, but refuses to use it.

Killing an enemy with teeth and bare hands is emotionally far more demanding than pulling a trigger or pressing a button. In inventing tools and weapons, in contriving civilization, we have disinhibited the controls - sometimes thoughtlessly and inadvertently, but sometimes with cool premeditation. If the beasts who are our nearest relatives engaged recklessly in … mass murder they would have rendered themselves extinct. If our non-human ancestors did it, we would not be here.

The secrets of evolution are death and time—the deaths of enormous numbers of lifeforms that were imperfectly adapted to the environment; and time for a long succession of small mutations.

I am a collection of water, calcium and organic molecules called Carl Sagan. You are a collection of almost identical molecules with a different collective label. But is that all? Is there nothing in here but molecules? Some people find this idea somehow demeaning to human dignity. For myself, I find it elevating that our universe permits the evolution of molecular machines as intricate and subtle as we.

Our very existence in that distant time requires that we will have changed our institutions and ourselves.

If there is as a continuum from self-reproducing molecules, such as DNA, to microbes, and an evolutionary sequence continuum from microbes to humans, why should we imagine that continuum to stop at humans?

There is nothing inhuman about an intelligent machine; it is indeed an expression of those superb intellectual capabilities that only human beings, of all the creatures on our planet, now possess.