Quotes About Evolution

Everyone who had reason to work with him agreed that he'd changed. A lot of his confidence seemed to have gone. He was less sure of himself, less prepared to take a risk or two, somehow smaller. Maybe it was something that would pass, said some. Maybe not.

What I mean is this: you meet someone, you think about them. You're already changing because of the way you think about them. You meet them again, you think about them some more, you're changing again. And on it goes. You are changing right now. Before my eyes.

Twenty years is, after all, a long time. We are not the same people we were. Old friends, lovers, even family members: they are strangers who happen to wear a familiar face. We have no right to claim to know anyone after such a distance.

Language aren't created in a day; some have evolved over hundreds, even thousands of years, and are still evolving. The user of any language must constantly invent to adapt to fresh circumstances, and when invention flags they must borrow.

A world of death is a world of stagnation, without the change that makes it worthwhile. What you call uncertainty, I call life itself.

If in Los Angeles in 1949 he had preached "fast and loud," by the time he got to New York in 1957 he had learned to dial down the speed and let the microphone do the heavy lifting.

We've been sitting in our tree chirping like foolish birds for over a century now, wondering why no other birds answered. The galactic skies are full of hawks, that's why. Planetisms that don't know enough to keep quiet, get eaten.

Diaspora starts about a thousand years from now. Most of human civilisation has moved inside computers essentially, a major branch of our descendants consists of conscious software.

The Transmuters had built a structure that dwarfed universes, but touched each one only lightly. They hadn't turned whole worlds to rubble, they hadn't reshaped galaxies in their image. Having evolved on some distant, finite world, they'd inherited the most valuable survival trait of all. Restraint.

We've been half right about a lot of things, but there's something missing from our theories, something whose nature we haven't even guessed yet. If we don't learn to understand it, it will kill us.

Conquering the Galaxy is what bacteria with spaceships would do – knowing no better, having no choice.

Francesca said, "But don't you see? We talk about God for the simple reason that we still want to. There's a deeply ingrained human compulsion to keep using that word, that concept – to keep honing it, rather than discarding it – despite the fact that it no longer means what it did five thousand years ago.

Evolution was a random walk across a minefield, not a pre-ordained trajectory, onward and upward toward "perfection.

I look up at her. "Let's not make a big deal of this. It's time for me to become a machine.

Imagine the time, a dozen generations from now, when wave mechanics powers every machine and everyone takes it for granted. Do you really want them thinking that it fell from the sky, fully formed, when the truth is that they owe their good fortune to the most powerful engine of change in history: people arguing about science.

Every few decades, at random, I take on new goals, at random. It's perfect. How could I improve on a scheme like that? I'm not stuck on any one thing forever; however much you think I'm wasting my time, it's only for fifty or a hundred years. What difference does that make, in the long run?

Every creature born in the flesh carried the genes of an ancestor who had lived through the most savage punishment this would could inflict.

We'll shape them through their memes," he said. "We'll kill off the bad memes, and help spread the ones we want to succeed.

All an organism could do from day to day was shore itself up in some rough semblance of its previous condition. The same was true, from moment to moment, for the state of the whole universe. By one means or another, everyone was an imperfect imitation

You'll never stop changing, but that doesn't mean you have to drift in the wind. Every day, you can take the person you've been, and the new things you've witnessed, and make your own, honest choice as to who you should become. "Whatever happens, you can always be true to yourself. But don't expect to end up with the same inner compass as anyone else. Not unless they started beside you, and climbed beside you every step of the way.

No one objects to the notion that every technological civilisation might undergo its own Introdus.

It's the same way people have always felt. Since the days we lived in caves and feared the violence of nature and then dreamed up the idea of gods and feared their anger and then joined together in groups and came to fear each other.

My grandfather had two boys, my uncle had three boys, my dad had me and my two brothers, each of my brothers have had two boys. Then something happened with the chromosomal experiment and suddenly I've got three girls.

In sports, people reach their peak very early. You have to move on. I don't know if I will ever surpass what I did at the Olympics, but I'm still doing the work I always wanted to do.