Quotes About Evolution

If heredity is a kind of memory, methylation suffers radical amnesia in every generation.

What we're not so good at is getting rid of viruses. Despite all the vaccines, antiviral drugs, and public health strategies at our disposal, viruses still manage to escape annihilation.

Our own lineage split off from that of chimpanzees roughly seven million years ago.

In the 1400s, people began to use a new word to define a group of animals that shared the same blood: a race.

Careful imitation could also explain why hand axes managed to stay so similar to each other for over a million years. If Homo erectus simply looked over old hand axes to guess how to make them, they would have accidentally introduced little variations to their craft. Over a few thousand years, those mismatches would have caused the hand ax to drift far away from its original shape.

If you stop and think through what it means to grow, the process is astonishing. Each part of the body has to change its shape and size to match every other part. There's no central blueprint for the construction of an adult human. Each cell has to decide for itself, using nothing more than chemical signals and its own network of genes, RNA molecules, and proteins.

Today's Europeans are fairly uniform, genetically speaking. But that uniformity came out of a biological blender.

Thirteen thousand years ago it fell to Antarctica. It rested in the Allan Hills as the Ice Age glaciers retreated, farmers discovered agriculture, cities rose, and rockets shot into space.

In the years after he was forced out of Vineland, Goddard drifted away from the eugenics movement. Rather than figuring out how to keep the feebleminded from having children, Goddard spent his time trying to find ways to help children, no matter their condition. "As for myself," Goddard once said, "I think I have gone over to the enemy.

And they certainly would not have guessed that the human genome is partly composed from thousands of viruses that infected our distant ancestors, or that life as we know it may have gotten its start four billion years ago from viruses.

Po naszej Å›mierci – pisaÅ' Dawkins – pozostajÄ… po nas dwie rzeczy: geny i memy

In the early 1900s, a Florida farmer found a notable bud sport while inspecting his grove of Walters grapefruit trees. Tree after tree bore white fruit, except one. On that tree, the farmer spotted a branch weighed down with pink fruits. From that single bud sport, all pink grapefruits descend.

I know now that human beings are creatures of awareness, involved in an evolutionary journey of awareness, beings indeed unknown to themselves, filled to the brim with incredible resources that are never used.

There are lots of things a warrior can do at a certain time which he couldn't do years before. Those things themselves did not change; what changed was his idea of himself.

La lucha que cada uno libra contra su antiguo ser dura toda la vida.

Most of us have the good or bad fortune of seeing our lives fall apart so slowly we barely notice.

Sometimes I think that Darwin made a mistake and that in fact man is descended from the pig, because eight out of every ten members of the human race are swine, and as crooked as a hog's tail.

The cinema began as an invention for entertaining the illiterate masses. Fifty years on, it's much the same.

Before I know it, I'll be thirty and I'll realise that every day I look less like the person I wanted to be when I was fifteen.

Darwin was a dreamer, I can assure you. No evolution or anything of the sort. For every one who can reason, I have to battle with nine orangutans.--Don Anacleto

To truly hate is an act one learns with time

Sabe, Daniel? A veces pienso que Darwin se equivocó y que en realidad el hombre desciende del cerdo, porque en ocho de cada diez homínidos hay un chorizo esperando a ser descubierto —argumentaba

Wissen sie, Daniel, manchmal denke ich, Darwin hat sich geirrt, und in Wirklichkeit stammt der Mensch vom Schwein oder vom Hund ab, denn in acht von zehn Hominiden steckt ein Schweinehund, der darauf wartet, rausgelassen zu werden.

Humans aren't descended from monkeys. They come from parrots.