Quotes About Evolution

With the exception of certain rodents, no other vertebrate except Homo sapiens habitually destroys members of his own species.

It is interesting that the U.S. has this very strong proportion of the population that rejects scientific conclusions about the age of the Earth and about evolutionary relationships between species, including humans.

The British ballads became a new kind of form in their hand. And out of them came the blues, a new kind of song of commentary and satire, a song form which, after all, has become the main musical form of the whole human species.

I don't think that we are a species or a people that can exist without making mistakes somewhere along the line.

It's a remarkable pace of which things change and adapt, and it's hard for us to keep up with as a species.

Married people from my generation are like an endangered species!

We should find inspiration in the senses that already exist and try to copy them and apply them to us. If we compare our senses to the senses of other animals and species that we don't have, we can get ideas for new abilities that we can adapt to humans by applying cybernetics to the body.

I certainly look at the modern guys and think they are a different species to when we played. They are fitter and their conditioning is extraordinary.

What the fossil record does do is to force us to contemplate our place on the planet. We are but one species of several hominids that inhabited Planet Earth, and like our distant cousins who went extinct fairly recently, our time on Planet Earth is also finite.

We need to take a leaf out of nature's book. Any species that clones itself will eventually be attacked by a parasite, leading to an inevitable population crash.

Species go extinct because there are historical contraints built into a given body or a given design.

I like L.A., but I think what's changed is that the kinds of films I do, the mid-range dramatic film, has become an endangered species.

For the first time in evolution as a species, we're hitting an energy ceiling.

If you're a gazelle, you don't have a very complex emotional life, despite being a social species. But primates are just smart enough that they can think their bodies into working differently. It's not until you get to primates that you get things that look like depression.

Closely related species of birds are also chromosomally similar.

I accept extinction as best explaining disjoined species. I see that the same cause must have reduced many species of great range to small, and that it may have reduced large genera to so small, and of families.

We observe closely related species in sympatry and infer how they evolved from a common ancestor.

Measles and TB evolved from diseases of our cattle, influenza from a disease of pigs, and smallpox possibly from a disease of camels. The Americas had very few native domesticated animal species from which humans could acquire such diseases.

I think that my main criticism in that book was directed at the general assumption that adaptation characterizes populations and species, rather than simply the individuals in the populations and species.

Why is it not just as likely that there were as many small general nearly at first as now, and as great a disproportion in the number of their species?

As much horror as we have always created, we are a species that keeps moving forward, seeing new sights in new ways, and enjoying the journey.

I had found again and again that the most aberrant population of a species - often having reached species rank, and occasionally classified even as a separate genus - occurred at a peripheral location, indeed usually at the most isolated peripheral location.

But it really wasn't until three to four years later, when we had an opportunity in the lab to make very detailed observations, and comparisons with other fossil discoveries, that we realized she was a new species of human ancestor.

When I realized, in 1978, that Lucy did represent a new species of human ancestor, and that I had an opportunity to name this new species, I realized this was a revolutionary step in understanding human origins.