Quotes About Evolution

Everything changes, nothing remains without change.

Mother Nature gives a sense of romance to young people, in place of prudence, to advance the species. It's a trick--that makes us grow.

Perfection is a road, not a destination. Every time I live, I get an education.

We must not be too proud or too stupid to profit by our mistakes—

To innovate is not to reform.

Thus we see how that the spine of even the hugest of living things tapers off at last into simple child's play.

It's occurred to me that our human values, our ideas of right and wrong, good and bad, evolved in simpler times, before there were machines.

War has always been violent blindman's buff, played with men's lives and nations' resources. But the time for it is over. As the race has outgrown human sacrifice, human slavery, and duelling, it has to outgrow war.

our human values, our ideas of right and wrong, good and bad, evolved in simpler times, before there were machines.

It's always ugly in the middle. At the root of transition is "transit," a voyage from one place to another. As in any voyage, there is a departure, a disorienting time of travel and, finally, a destination. Transitions guru William Bridges calls the time between endings and new beginnings the "neutral zone," a "neither here nor there" psychological space where identities are in flux and people feel they have lost the ground beneath their feet.

Change always takes much longer than we expect because to make room for the new, we have to get rid of some of the old selves we are still dragging around and, unconsciously, still invested in becoming.

Most people who have made big career changes have heard loved ones tell them, "You're out of your mind." Sabotage is not their intention, but a shared history has entrenched certain expectations, and reinventing oneself can amount to breaking the implicit "contract." People who have quit smoking, lost weight, or gotten divorced are familiar with the mixed reactions of friends, who see the change as loss.

Dropping our long-held assumptions, however, is not a simple matter of letting go once and for all. We are usually dealing with a mixed bag of preferences, priorities, and habits, some that we should hold on to and others we should jettison.

most of those that were great once have since slumped into decline, and those that used to be insignificant have risen, within my own lifetime, to rank as mighty powers.

For what's the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before.

we must set aside old notions and embrace fresh ones; and, as we learn, we must be daily unlearning something which it has cost us no small labour and anxiety to acquire.

Eukaryotes topped that trick with yet another innovation—an elaborately orchestrated breakthrough in cell-division called meiosis.

One may code for wrinkles, while the other holds the blueprint for smooth. As long as they stay together, only the stronger of each pair rules. Eukaryotes took advantage of this disagreement between twins. Prokaryotes had xeroxed chromosomes in their entirety. But eukaryotes unzipped their chromosomal ribbons lengthwise, ever-so gently separating each genetic pair. This yielded two skinny juliennes,‡ each with slightly different properties.

Eukaryotes thus launched a great leap forward in data mix-and-matching, one which roils and churns within us to this day. We latter-age eukaryotes call the resulting DNA cut-and-shuffle sexuality.

The dividing eukaryote could not aggressively seek food. Nor could it avoid predatory one-celled creatures whipping through the water in search of someone to eat. The solution: to concentrate spirochetic propellers on the outside of one cell, then to generate an attached cell whose spirochetes could stay inside directing the dance of twining and dividing chromosomes. This, according to Margulis, would start the run-up to another massive leap in the evolution of networks: multicellularity.

These evolutionary achievements were incremental steps toward multicellularity. Colonies of single-celled organisms could be sieved apart, then, if given freedom, were (and still are) able to reconstruct their shattered community.

True to Dr. Sauer's words, 1.4 billion years33 after the new eukaryotic refinements had begun, the first really exotic multicellular beings made their debut beneath the sun.34 One recently discovered fossil clam dates to over 720 million B.C.

the scientific view that all behavior is ultimately based on self-interest isn't new at all—it began its climb early in the twentieth century.

As we've already seen, individual selectionists insist that a creature—be he man or woman or beast—will only sacrifice his comfort if the payback to his genes is greater than what he gives.