Quotes About Evolution

Personally I rather look forward to a computer program winning the world championship. Humanitiy needs a lesson in humility.

Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators

All life, all intelligence, all creativity and all 'design' anywhere in the universe, is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection. It follows that design comes late in the universe, after a period of Darwinian evolution. Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.

45 per cent of the population of the United States firmly believes, to the contrary, an elementary falsehood: that all species separately owe their existence to 'intelligent design' less than ten thousand years ago.

Whatever the philosophical problems raised by consciousness, for the purpose of this story it can be thought of as the culmination of an evolutionary trend towards the emancipation of survival machines as executive decision-takers from their ultimate masters, the genes. [The Selfish Gene]

Humans have always wondered about the meaning of life... life has no higher purpose than to perpetuate the survival of DNA... life has no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.

Could it have been the drawing of maps that boosted our ancestors beyond the critical threshold which the other apes just failed to cross?

Evolutionary psychologists have noted the particular eagerness with which new babies are scanned for resemblances to their paternal, as opposed to maternal relatives – for the obvious reason that it is harder to be confident of paternity than maternity.

Natural selection is anything but random.

There's a kind of science defense lobby or evolution defense lobby in particular . They are mostly atheist, but they are desperately wanting to be friendly to mainstream, sensible, religious people. And the way you do that is to tell them that there's no incompatibility between science and religion. [Expelled, No Intelligence allowed, 2008, 47m38]

As I have put it before, if the second dinosaur to the left of the tall cycad tree had not happened to sneeze and thereby fail to catch the tiny, shrew-like ancestor of all the mammals, we would none of us be here. We all can regard ourselves as exquisitely improbable. But here, in a triumph of hindsight, we are.

But perhaps life has a tendency to converge on a pathway, something like a magnetic pull that draws it back despite temporary deviations.

Selection has favoured genes that cooperate with others. In the fierce competition for scarce resources, in the relentless struggle to eat other survival machines, and to avoid being eaten, there must have been a premium on central coordination rahter than anarchy within the comunal body.

For three million years we were hunter-gatherers, and it was through the evolutionary pressures of that way of life that a brain so adaptable and so creative eventually emerged. Today we stand with the brains of hunter-gatherers in our heads, looking out on a modern world made comfortable for some by the fruits of human inventiveness, and made miserable for others by the scandal of deprivation in the midst of plenty.

Maybe we have lost the ability, that sixth sense that allows us to see miracles and have visions and understand that we are something other, larger than what we have been told. Maybe evolution has been going on in reverse longer than I suspect, and we are already sad, dumb fish.

And one thing, as they sometimes do, led not to another, but shattered a world.

Pushing away, pushing in: the pattern of so much that was to follow.

Things happen when people are not where they belong, and the world moves forward and back by that principle.

Most things dopn't stay the way they are very long.

entering the past is a precarious business, since the past strives but always half-fails to make us who we are.

then nothing was ever again as it had been. You don't think things like that can happen. Then you find out they both can and will. So

Unbridled commerce isn't generally pretty, but it's always forward-thinking.

Towns aren't even towns anymore," Vicki said, sensing my distraction with this sad evolution, and giving me a hug around my middle. "Dallas wasn't ever one, when you get right down to it. It's just a suburb looking for a place to light.

Voyez-vous, d'après mon expérience, c'est quand on a l'impression de ne pas progresser qu'on avance sans doute le plus. »