Quotes About Evolution

Bacteria dominated our planet for another 2,500 million years before the first truly complex organisms appeared in the fossil record.

Essentially all life uses redox chemistry to generate a gradient of protons across a membrane. Why on earth do we do that?

The first true eyes appeared somewhat abruptly in the fossil record around 540 million

Onions, wheat and amoebae have more genes and more DNA than we do. Amphibians such as frogs and salamanders have genome sizes that range over two orders of magnitude, with some salamander genomes being 40 times larger than our own, and some frogs being less than a third of our size. If

Geochemistry gives rise seamlessly to biochemistry.

So it seems to me there are two big unknowns at the very heart of biology today: why life evolved in the perplexing way it did, and why cells are powered in such a peculiar fashion. This

We know a great deal about the molecular mechanisms of evolution and about the history of life on our planet, but far less about which parts of this history are chance – trajectories that could have played out quite differently on other planets – and which bits are dictated by physical laws or constraints.

the igneo-aerial food." In other words, despite

For that matter, how do we switch from simple chemical affiliations to selection for proteins? And how do we get from RNA to DNA? As it happens, there are some striking answers, backed up by surprising findings in the last few years. Gratifyingly, the new findings square beautifully with the idea of life evolving in hydrothermal vents, the setting of Chapter 1.

While a few men seek to justify their existence by assuming the burden of childcare, or material provisioning, the same is not true of many lower creatures, human or otherwise, where the males quite literally just fuck off.

As a rule of thumb, the hermaphrodite lifestyle works well if the prospects of finding a mate are slim, for example in low-density or immobile populations (explaining why many plants are hermaphrodites), while separate sexes develop in species with higher population densities or greater mobility.

multicellular life. All animals, all plants, all of them depend on

Childhood is a process of slowly recomposing oneself out of the borrowed materials of the world.

The whole afternoon might go by without our saying a word. If we do talk, we might never speak in Yiddish. The words of our childhood became strangers to us--we couldn't use them in the same way and so we chose not to use them at all. Life demanded a new language.

How little needs to stay the same for you to continue the effort they call, for lack of a better word, being human.

All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment…

Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman—a rope over an abyss. A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting.

All mistakes teach us something, so there are, in reality, no mistakes.

A lot of people resist transition and therefore never allow themselves to enjoy who they are. Embrace the change, no matter what it is; once you do, you can learn about the new world you're in and take advantage of it.-Nikki Giovanni

The progressive development of man is vitally dependent on invention.

Genius is its own passport, and has always been ready to change habitats until the natural one is found.

Our first endeavors are purely instinctive, promptings of an imagination vivid and undisciplined. As we grow older reason asserts itself and we become more and more systematic and designing.

It is paradoxical, yet true, to say, that the more we know, the more ignorant we become in the absolute sense, for it is only through enlightenment that we become conscious of our limitations. Precisely one of the most gratifying results of intellectual evolution is the continuous opening up of new and greater prospects.

Jules Breton has spoken of the history of his life as being at the same time the genesis of his art. This is true of Nikola Tesla's evolution. His bent toward invention we may surely trace to his mother, who, as the wife of an eloquent clergyman in the Greek Church, made