Quotes About Evolution

How far could a person change and still remain human?

The history of sex is the history of glimpses: first ankles, then cleavage, then knees. More recently, tattoos, navel rings, tongue studs, underwear…" (p. 92).

It turns out, to disrupt someone else's business, you have to add a net new line of business to your own portfolio. This

First there is a mountain, Then there is no mountain, Then there is. —Zen proverb

Technologies from a prior era, once the focal point of innovation, now become the scaffolding upon which next-generation innovation will build.

By contrast, the early majority want to buy a productivity improvement for existing operations. They are looking to minimize the discontinuity with the old ways. They want evolution, not revolution. They want technology to enhance, not overthrow, the established ways of doing business. And above all, they do not want to debug somebody else's product. By the time they adopt it, they want it to work properly and to integrate appropriately with their existing technology base.

The winning strategy does not just change as we move from stage to stage, it actually reverses the prior strategy.

In December 1941, when Australians began to sense that they were plunged into a new environment, the spectacles they had carried out from Britain were obsolete. They needed spectacles that would correct short-sightedness. They had to see the environment they were in as clearly as the environment they had left across the world.

Much of Australia's history had been shaped by the contradiction that it depended intimately and comprehensively on a country which was further away that almost any other in the world. Now the dependence had slackened, the distance had diminished. The Antipodes were drifting, though where they were drifting no one knew.

Innovation is usually not a gigantic step but a series of small jumps involving various enterprising people whose names are soon forgotten.

the song and dance musical comedies that prevailed in the 1920s and '30s and the integrated musicals that became more influential in the 1940s and '50s both allow a meaningful dramatic relationship between songs and their shows.

Yet in our asshen olde is fyr yreke.

Dismissing the idea that female choice could influence the direction of evolution began to look both sexist and unscientific. By drawing attention to the evolution of social and sexual behavior in animals, the sociobiology of the 1970s did for the study of animal sexuality what feminism did for the study of human sexuality. It empowered thinkers to ask "Why does sex work like this, instead of some other way?

You could be the fittest person imaginable in terms of strength, intelligence, disease resistance and vitality, but if you fail to reproduce your contribution to the future of the human gene pool is zero. For anything to evolve it has to affect the probability of passing on your genes.

Thus the name of the game when it comes to evolution is not obtaining food or other resources: it is reproduction. Which came first, the chick or the egg? From an evolutionary perspective the egg did. A chicken is merely an egg's way of producing another egg. The chicken is just a transient reproductive superstructure that provides for the perpetuation of genes.

By intelligently choosing their sexual partners for their mental abilities, our ancestors became the intelligent force behind the human mind's evolution.

Our sense of beauty was shaped by evolution to embody awareness of what is difficult as opposed to easy, rare as opposed to common, costly as opposed to cheap, skillful as opposed to talentless, and fit as opposed to unfit.

It seems likely that male choice shaped breasts not to distinguish girls from women, but to distinguish young women from older women. Here, the informative thing about breasts is the way they droop with the effects of age and gravity.

A capacity for comedy reveals a capacity for creativity. It plays upon our intense neophilia. It circumvents our tendencies towards boredom. Creativity is a reliable indicator of intelligence, energy, youth, and proteanism. Humor is attractive, and that is why it evolved.

Nothing that is will always be.- Open Mic Singer

If you tell me the size of a mammal, I can use the scaling laws to tell you almost everything about the average values of its measurable characteristics: how much food it needs to eat each day, what its heart rate is, how long it will take to mature, the length and radius of its aorta, its life span, how many offspring it will have, and so on. Given the extraordinary complexity and diversity of life, this is pretty amazing.

Julian Huxley brought several other new words and concepts into biology, including replacing the much-maligned term race with the phrase ethnic group.

Ants brilliantly self-organized to evolve remarkably robust and hugely successful and sophisticated physical and social structures, but it took them millions of years to do so. Furthermore, they accomplished this more than 50 million years ago and have barely evolved beyond it since.

Perhaps, then, the most surprising consequence of a visionary Theory of Everything is that it implies that on the grand scale the universe, including its origins and evolution, though extremely complicated, is not complex but in fact is surprisingly simple because it can be encoded in a limited number of equations, conceivably even just a single master equation.