Quotes About Evolution

Notwithstanding all its progress, philosophy has been unable as yet to offer the masses any ideal that can charm them; but, as they must have their illusions at all cost, they turn instinctively, as the insect seeks the light, to the rhetoricians who accord them what they want. Not truth, but error has always been the chief factor in the evolution of nations,

Les événements mémorables de l'histoire sont les effets visibles des invisibles changements de la pensée des homes

But I can divine one thing: in Mexican food's rumble through this country, in the trail behind and the road ahead, I see us -- always evolving, never stagnant, continually striving for something better, constantly delicious. The American spirit manifested as a combo plate, heavy on the salsa.

History is no longer as it was for the Greeks, an anamnesis, a remembrance. It is rather a thrust into the future.

Only four years ago they had presumably been carefree, single girls laughing in a disco and now, as if hardened by some battle, they were assertive, humourless creatures he would not care to live with.

nothing now exists that is so valuable as whatever theoretically might replace it.

The ability of Neolithic peoples in Britain to coordinate the movement of stone into monumental tombs and circles by the fourth millennium BC, quite apart from the cultural and religious motivations to do so, shows that societies in Britain had already evolved into communities capable of sustained cooperative activity. The production and migration of pottery and stone axes is evidence

Really, it is unfair to say that English spelling is not an accurate rendering of speech. It is – it's only that it renders the speech of the 16th century.

there is an inverse correlation between the complexity of society and of word structure!

Language is mankind's greatest invention – except, of course, that it was never invented.

The wheels of language run so smoothly that one rarely bothers to stop and think about all the resourcefulness and expertise that must have gone into making it tick. Language conceals its art.

People can cope with the chaos of change over the years (that is, with 'diachronic variation'), simply because they can cope with the even greater chaos of synchronic variation, the diversity at any one point in time.

Mankind's perception of color, he says, increased "according to the schema of the color spectrum": first came the sensitivity to red, then to yellow, then to green, and only finally to blue and violet. The most remarkable thing about it all, he adds, is that this development seems to have occurred in exactly the same order in different cultures all over the world. Thus, in Geiger's hands, Gladstone's discoveries about

without these much maligned forces of destruction, language would never have developed in the first place.

The new anthropology required each culture to be understood on its own terms, as a product of its own evolution rather than as merely an earlier stage in the ascent toward Western civilization.

According to some researchers, hominids prior to Homo sapiens could not, for instance, produce the vowel i {ee}. But ultimately, this does not say very much, since by all accounts, et es perfectle pesseble to have a thoroughle respectable language wethout the vowel i.

Linguistic "technology" in the form of sophisticate grammatical structures is not a prerogative of advanced civilization, but is found even in the languages of the most primitive hunter-gatherers. As the linguist Edward Sapir memorably put it in 1921, when it comes to the complexity of grammatical structures "Plato walks with the Macedonian swineherd, Confucius with the head-hunting savage of Assam".

Language is mankind's greatest inventiom… that it was never invented.

The simple truth is that ll languages change, all the time - the only static languages are dead ones.

Daha önce önemli olan pek çok ÅŸeyin art?k o kadar önemli olmad???n?, eskiden çok istediÄŸimiz ÅŸeylerin art?k bizim için neredeyse hiçbir önem ta??mad???n? gösterecek anlarla her zaman kar??laÅŸaca??m?z gerçeÄŸini -Åžimdi- hat?rlayabilsek, o zaman...

There was some sadness in how that could happen, Tai thought: falling out of love with something that had shaped you. Or even people who had? But if you didn't change at least a little, where were the passages of a life? Didn't learning, changing, sometimes mean letting go of what had once been seen as true?

We are always the person we were, and we grow into someone very different, if we live long enough. Both things are true.

And in that moment Dianora had a truth brought home to her with finality: how something can seem quite unchanged in all the small surface details of existence where things never really change, men and women being what they are, but how the core, the pulse, the kernel of everything can still have become utterly unlike what it had been before.

His intelligence stretched her to the limits, and then changed what those limits were.