Quotes About Evolution

From the beginning, we've been yanked together by the tug of sociality. Three and a half billion years ago, our earliest cellular ancestors, bacteria, evolved in colonies. Each bacterium couldn't live without the comfort of rubbing against its neighbors.

There are numerous hints that trade, like the spiny lobsters' seasonal parades, may have been stamped by the Baldwin Effect into human DNA. Animal behaviorist Frans de Waal feels that humans offer each other presents (and expect returns) much more often than other primates do. This tendency shows up just a few years after birth, when children are often driven by instinct more powerfully than by what they've learned.

The latest findings suggest that before the new sphere's crust could even stabilize, the powers of chemical attraction yanked together the first detectable life.

The clam had shown up 200 million years before the action really began. Virtually all the phyla that have crawled, walked, flown, or swum during the modern era arose roughly 520 million years ago in a blink of geologic time so brief it's called the "Cambrian explosion.

Modern bacteria still shift from pioneers to colonizers and back to pioneers again, leaving ripples of concentric circles clear as a dartboard's rings.

a lot of evolution has gone over the dam since 3.5 billion B.C. What, if anything, has happened to the global brain since then? The story is a strange one. Paleontological dogma has it that virtually nothing of significance occurred again until the Cambrian explosion roughly 535 million years ago.

Roughly 130,000 years ago,1 the diversity generator of creative bickering drove tribes to run an artificial crease down their centers, sorting shoulder-rubbing neighbors into two opposing groups. These primordial forms of fabricated cleavage, known to anthropologists as moieties, were apparently a way to keep the deformities of inbreeding at bay.

Memes have an ultimate ambition: taking vast chunks of the world into their possession and restructuring it according to their form.

The experience of the Mayas is one more reminder that any interpretation of human evolution based on the idea of unilineal progress forwards (or upwards) is an illusion. Peoples decline as well as rise.

Books have a way of dwelling like parasites, carried forth in the minds of readers, turning up by force of succession in later works of art. I was part of that living chain of ideas reaching into the future.

A lot of blood has gone under the bridge since then, and we have all learned a hell of a lot about the realities of Politics in America. Even the politicians have learned – but, as usual, the politicians are much slower than the people they want to lead.

And in fact the only way I can deal with this eerie situation at all is to make a conscious decision that I have already lived and finished the life I planned to live - and everything from now on will be A New Life, a different thing, a gig that ends tonight and starts tomorrow morning.

Yesterday's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why

It was just a stage I was going through.

I still don't understand fashion. Why do people dress up in new styles in the first place if they're only going to act all embarrassed and ashamed about them later?

those retrospectively blessed dozen years lasted from the chilly, fevered Central European night of November 9th, 1989 to that bright morning on the Eastern Seaboard of American of September 11th, 2001. One event symbolized the lifted threat of a worldwide nuclear holocaust, something which had been hanging over humanity for nearly forty years, and so ended an age of idiocy. The other ushered in a new one.

As others have argued in many contexts, we do harm to emerging ways of doing things by protecting old ways.

History is moving pretty quickly these days, and the heroes and villains keep changing parts.

History is moving pretty quickly these days and the heroes and villains keep on changing parts.' Mathis

It's to the effect that America has progressed from infancy to senility without having passed through a period of maturity.

children are at heart selfish, and reasonably so, for they are programmed for survival.

Come si erano conosciuti, e come mai due innamorati dell'era moderna si rivelano così timidi e ingenui? Pur reputandosi troppo evoluti per credere al destino, restava paradossale ai loro occhi il fatto che un incontro di quella portata potesse essersi verificato per caso, determinato da centinaia di contingenze e scelte indi significanti. L'eventualità che non succedesse affatto era un pensiero tanto terrificante quanto possibile.

It was once convenient to think biblically, to believe we're surrounded for our benefit by edible automata on land and sea. Now it turns out that even fish can feel pain. This is the growing complication of the modern condition, the expanding circle of moral sympathy.

other minds, must continue to fascinate us. As artificial people became more like us, then became us, then became more than us, we could never tire of them. They were bound to surprise us. They might fail us in ways that were beyond our imagining. Tragedy was a possibility, but not boredom.