Quotes About Evolution

We are who we are. When changes come, we start with what we are right then, and then we work to try to become whoever we need to be.

Saving the human race is a frantic one. Or a tedious one. It all depends on what stage of the process you're taking part in.

It isn't the world at stake, Ender. Just us. Just humankind. As far as the rest of the earth is concerned, we could be wiped out and it would adjust, it would get on with the next step in evolution. But humanity doesn't want to die. As a species, we have evolved to survive.

Human beings remain grubs all the lives.

Nature can't evolve a species that hasn't a will to survive. Individuals might be bred to sacrifice themselves, but the race as a whole can never decide to cease to exist.

Europe was already Europe.

It was an unbroken network of causality leading back to the first human who wasn't a chimp. And farther back, to the coalescing of the planets around the sun. If you wish to call that God, go ahead.

Human beings didn't evolve brains in order to lie around on lakes. Killing's the first thing we learned.

Writers create themselves as they create their work. Or perhaps they create their work in order to create themselves.

As a species, we have evolved to survive. And the way we do it is by straining and straining and, at last, every few generations, giving birth to genius. The one who invents the wheel. And light. And flight. The one who builds a city, a nation, an empire.

Stories are invented as you go along...

And it's true, thought Valentine. I'm not the same person, really, from book to book, because each world changes who I am, even as I write down the story of the world. And this world most of all.

As far as the rest of the biosphere is concerned, we could be wiped out and it would adjust, it would get on with the next step in evolution. But

It is a will for the species to survive with the self inside of it, part of it, tied to it, forever one of the strands in the web–

Nature can't evolve a species that hasn't a will to survive. Individuals might be bred to sacrifice themselves, but the race as a whole can never decide to cease to exist. So if we can we'll kill every last one of the buggers, and if they can they'll kill every last one of us.

But humanity doesn't want to die. As a species, we have evolved to survive. And the way we do it is by straining and straining and, at last, every few generations, giving birth to genius. The one who invents the wheel. And light. And flight. The one who builds a city, a nation, an empire.

who had already taken humanity a step further than it had ever gone before.

idea that people from the next village are as human as ourselves, it is presumptuous in the extreme to suppose we could ever look at sociable, tool-making creatures who arose from other evolutionary paths

Any animal is willing to kill in order to save itself.' 'Any animal is willing to kill the Other,' said Ender. 'But the higher beings include more and more living things within their self-story, until at last there is no Other. Until the needs of others are more important than any private desires. The highest beings of all are the ones who are willing to pay any personal cost for the good of those who need them.

Thus a man hates the house they lived in together, because either he does not change it, so that it is as dead as his wife, or because he does change it, so that it is no longer half of their making.

What if the first homo sapiens had felt that way? We'd all still be neanderthals, and when the Buggers came they would have blasted us all to bits and that would be that." "We didn't evolve from neanderthals," said Bean. "Well, it's a good thing we have that little fact squared away," said Petra.

The limbic node deep in her brain didn't understand that she no longer lived in a tree, no longer had to panic when she felt herself to be falling.

Their young go through a helpless grub stage, too, which lasts longer than some of them think.

There were not enough women among them, but they began to work out social patterns that would maximize reproduction and keep from having too many males without a hope of mating. Within a generation or two, if babies came in the usual proportions, half male and half female, the normal human pattern of monogamy could be restored.