Quotes About Evolution

I'm not proud of who I was back then, but I also know it's impossible to change the past.

The faster you strip cultures down, the more you find contrariness and disputation, rather than a solid core, until eventually you reach the individual, a mammal shaped by evolution, material needs, cognitive biases and historical circumstances no doubt, but still a creature with a better right to state his opinions than kings and clerics have to silence them.

I used to think--and given the way we ended up, maybe I still do--that all relationships need the kind of violent shove that a crush brings, just to get you started and to push you over the humps. And then, when the energy from that shove has gone and you come to something approaching a halt, you have to look around and see what you've got. It could be something completely different, it could be something roughly the same, but gentler and calmer, or it could be nothing at all.

Between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four, foreplay changes from being something that boys want to do and girls don't, to something that women want and men can't be bothered with. ... The perfect match, if you ask me, is between the Cosmo woman and the fourteen-year old boy.

There were only seven years between the first and last Beatles albums. That's nothing, seven years, when you think of how their hairstyles changed and their music changed. Some bands now go seven years without hardly bothering to do anything.

He was a story at least, even if he never became anything else.

It had only taken me six years to change from a ten-year-old to a sixteen-year-old; surely six years wasn't long enough for a transformation of that magnitude.

like being able to see how I got from Deep Purple to Howlin' Wolf in twenty-five moves; I am no longer pained by the memory of listening to "Sexual Healing" all the way through a period of enforced celibacy, or embarrassed by the reminder of forming a rock club at school, so that I and my fellow fifth-formers could get together and talk about Ziggy Stardust and Tommy.

There aren't too many candlelit dinners and second honeymoons, I can tell you. We're beyond all that. We're good friends more than anything.

Life was about to begin, so Arsenal had to go.

Women who disapprove of men—and there's plenty to disapprove of—should remember how we started out, and how far we have had to travel. 3.

we are what's happened to us.

All complex life shares an astonishing catalogue of elaborate traits, from sex to cell suicide to senescence, none of which is seen in a comparable form in bacteria.

Our terminal decline into old age and death stems from the fine print of the contract that we signed with our mitochondria two billion years ago.

I will argue that energy has constrained the evolution of life on earth; that the same forces ought to apply elsewhere in the universe; and that a synthesis of energy and evolution could be the basis for a more predictive biology, helping us understand why life is the way it is, not only on earth, but wherever it might exist in the universe.

it's no mystery that all cells here on earth should be chemiosmotic. I would expect that cells across the universe will be chemiosmotic too.

Sex is far more widespread than seems reasonable.

Core metabolism has changed little in part because it was never powered down in its four-billion-year history. The genes are custodians of this flame, but without the flame life is – dead.

NASA 'working definition' of life, for example: life is 'a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution'.

Once the little squirt has found a suitable home, it attaches itself soundly to the spot and then, needing it no longer, reabsorbs its own brain (a feat that arouses much admiration among university professors, Steve Jones quips).

I hope to persuade you that energy is central to evolution, that we can only understand the properties of life if we bring energy into the equation.

I will lay out a hypothesis – tell a coherent story – that connects energy and evolution.

was a world on which life emerged, 3,800 million years ago, perhaps animated by something of the restlessness of the planet itself.

there isn't a full consensus among experts. But strip away a few more skins from the onion of time and, by 3,400 million years ago