Quotes About Evolution

È difficile sopravvalutare l'importanza della sedentarietà e dell'affollamento che ha reso possibile: significa che in pratica tutte le malattie infettive causate da microorganismi specificatamente adattati all' homo sapiens hanno iniziato a esistere soltanto diecimila anni fa, forse molte di loro solo negli ultimi cinquemila anni; che sono un «effetto della civiltà» nel vero senso della parola.

It took about one century for them [the negative consequences] to show up clearly. Many

There is no such thing as history undistorted. Decisive transformations of meaning occurred, and are occurring still.

The Bible was written two thousand years ago. The world is a different place now. Stories that had meaning then are meaningless now. Beliefs that might have been valid then are invalid now. Those books should be looked at in the same way we look at anything of that age with interest with an acknowledgement of the historical importance but they should not be thought of as anything that has any value.

Billions of years ago there were just blobs of protoplasm; now billions of years later here we are. So information has been created and stored in our structure. In the development of one person's mind from childhood, information is clearly not just accumulated but also generated—created from connections that were not there before

chaos is a science of process rather than state, of becoming rather than being.

The history of life is written in terms of negative entropy.

Nonlinearity means that the act of playing the game has a way of changing the rules.

Revolutions do not come piecemeal. One account of nature replaces another.

This free use of the line for flirtation purposes has grown to an alarming extent," he wrote, "and if it is to go on somebody must pay for it." The Bell companies tried to discourage frivolous telephony, particularly by women and servants.

The writing system at the opposite extreme took the longest to emerge: the alphabet, one symbol for one minimal sound. The alphabet is the most reductive, the most subversive of all scripts. In all the languages of earth there is only one word for alphabet (alfabet, alfabeto, ). The alphabet was invented only once.

A "file" was originally—in sixteenth-century England—a wire on which slips and bills and notes and letters could be strung for preservation and reference. Then came file folders, file drawers, and file cabinets; then the electronic namesakes of all these; and the inevitable irony. Once a piece of information is filed, it is statistically unlikely ever to be seen again by human eyes.

The essentially unchangeable established order of things slowly disappeared and was forgotten for a while completely.

The first of these phases is that of grammar, invented by the Greeks and carried on unchanged by the French. It never had any philosophical view of a language as such.

The basic idea of email has remained essentially unchanged since the first networked message was sent in 1971. And while email is great for one-on-one, formal correspondence, there are far better tools for collaboration.

Very few species have survived unchanged. There's one called lingula, which is a little shellfish, a little brachiopod about the size of my fingernail, that has survived for 500 million years, but it's survived by being unobtrusive and doing nothing, and you can't accuse human beings of that.

While today's fraternities are hardly the literary- and debate-inspired groups of yore, their core mission - or, at the least, their ideal core mission and the one touted loudly in their public chapter and promotional materials - remains largely unchanged.

I think Wilco is going to definitely stand the test of time - no question - and Uncle Tupleo, and the whole No Depression scene, which is now alt-country. I think that's going to be around a long time.

Mom was a smoker. My grandfather was a smoker. My aunts were smokers. My uncles were smokers. I don't know any smokers now, not even my mom.

When I was growing up, Asians weren't known for dancing. I knew all my older aunts and uncles did, like, ballroom dancing and stuff. And then you saw all those dance crews, like Quest and Jabbawockeez, and now they're, like, known for dance.

I like making myself uncomfortable and throwing different stuff my way and trying to find a solution for it. I think that's how you improve. Find a way to make yourself uncomfortable, get comfortable with it, and do it again.

I always felt uncomfortable with real estate because buildings don't move, and neighborhoods change.

Change is uncomfortable.

Darwin's idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition.