Quotes About Evolution

The sorrow bird: We've gone too far. I'm afraid we can't go back. Hoopoe: Back?... There's a circle, bird. Why, just think of the phoenix. He lives alone for more than a thousand years acquiring great wisdom and when it's his time to go, he gathers leaves around himself, spreads his wings, and starts a fire - a new phoenix is born from his ashes. We're going forward, bird!

Changing the way we have lived for twenty or forty or sixty years is nothing short of a revolution. 4.

Be willing to tolerate the discomfort necessary for growth.

Stage One: "You are wrong for changing and here are the reasons why." Stage Two: "Change back and we will accept you again." Stage Three: "If you don't change back, these are the consequences" (which are then listed).21

We change our behavior when the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of changing.

We change our behavior when the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of changing."6

Think of your husband as a house. You are allowed to give him a fresh coat of paint and change out the furniture now and then. But if you're constantly trying to pour a new foundation or replace the roof, you're in serious trouble.

Every bride and groom in the history of civilization has gained weight after their wedding day. It is only a matter of time until archaeologists unearth a married caveman who's wearing a pair of old tux pants that were so tight he couldn't get the zipper closed.

You don't get credit because the program works. We're going to the next level. Working programs are a given,

just failing is not the key; the key is to be systematically learning from failures.

What one generation finds ridiculous, the next accepts; and the third shudders when it looks back on what the first did.

The human being does not hop out of the magician's hat in the way that the ape climbs down from the tree; he also does not emerge from the hand of a creator who surveys everything in advance with his foreknowledge. He is the product of a production that is not itself a human being. The human being was not yet what he would become before he became it.

We know that, over the past 10,000 years, larger polities consistently outcompeted smaller ones, with the result that 99.8 percent of people today live in countries with populations of one million or more.

It takes at least 100 human generations for agricultural societies to develop into states

Our oversized brains evolved, in large part, to detect and resist manipulation by those who want to get ahead at our expense.

Such perfection endures. For more than two millennia after horse-riding was invented, the warhorse remained the most important military technology bar none. A plentiful supply of horses was critical even in the 19th century, well after firearms had replaced the bows and arrows. Have you ever wondered why Napoleon, who won all of his battles until 1812, lost one battle after another in 1813 and 1814, leading to defeat and abdication? The surprising answer is: horses.

Humans are uniquely good throwers. No other species even comes close. Monkeys and apes can throw branches, rotten fruit, and excrement (I still remember an encounter with an irate troop of howler monkeys in Costa Rica . . .), but they do not use projectiles as lethal weapons in hunting or combat. Our closest relatives, chimpanzees, are quite pathetic at throwing.94 Imagine

four Fs" of evolutionary survival: Fleeing, Fighting, Feeding and Fucking. If any one of these instincts malfunctions in a species, the species will eventually become extinct.

It can be argued that the current rise of serial killers can be perhaps attributed to a new evolutionary prerogative for the demise of our species; Mother Nature's little way of saying, in among several other ways, that there might be too many humans on the planet.)

Primitive humans developed a neurosis, an irrational or imaginary fear, one not caused by an actual threat: necrophobia—a fear of the dead.

This complex structure, in which people were required to predict the behaviour of others in social situations, is generally regarded as the mechanism by which consciousness evolved. In predicting the behaviour of others, an individual would have acquired a sense of self.

Computers bootstrap their own offspring, grow so wise and incomprehensible that their communiqués assume the hallmarks of dementia: unfocused and irrelevant to the barely-intelligent creatures left behind. And when your surpassing creations find the answers you asked for, you can't understand their analysis and you can't verify their answers. You have to take their word on faith.

What is Human history, if not an ongoing succession of greater technologies grinding lesser ones beneath their boots?

Most people seem to think that organisms develop adaptive traits in response to environmental change. This is bullshit. The environment changes and those who already happen to have newly adaptive traits don't get wiped out.