Quotes About Evolution

Every day we reconstruct ourselves out of the salvage of our yesterdays.

Certain things I remember exactly as they were. They are merely discolored a bit by time, like coins in the pocket of a forgotten suit.

There's a time in life when everything becomes ex—ex-athlete, ex-president, expatriate, x-ray.

Art – the one achievement of man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised

Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death... others through sheer inability to cross the street.

Progress was all right. Only it went on too long.

On his misfit globe he has outlasted the mammoth and the pterodactyl, but he has never got the upper hand of bacteria and the insects.

Your brain never stops developing and changing. It's been doing it from the time you were an embryo, and will keep doing it all your life. And this ability, perhaps, represents its greatest strength.

Monuments look static - carved in stone and all - but their meanings change as the present changes and as people enact new rituals at them.

In Cosmides and Tooby's words, "Our modern skulls house a stone age mind."20 They continue: "In many cases, our brains are better at solving the kinds of problems our ancestors faced on the African savannahs than they are at solving the more familiar tasks we face in a college classroom or a modern city.

For example, automobiles kill far more people today than do spiders or snakes. But people are far more averse to spiders and snakes than they are to automobiles. Why? Because in our EEA spiders and snakes were a serious threat to our survival and reproduction, whereas automobiles did not exist. Thus, it was possible—not to mention advantageous for our survival and reproduction—for us to evolve an innate aversion to spiders and snakes, but not to automobiles.

As anthropologist Michael Ghiglieri writes: "Xenophobia and ethnocentrism are not just essential ingredients to war. Because they instinctively tell men precisely whom to bond with versus whom to fight against, they are the most dangerously manipulable facets of war psychology that promote genocide. Indeed, genocide itself has become a potent force in human evolution.

We all want to see Sunshine after Moonlight.

Out of mistakes grows wisdom.

Change wasn't easy, even when life forced change upon you.

metamorphosis

When I go back to my hometown, it's grown so much that I get lost. I never needed a map when I lived there, but now I couldn't get around without GPS.

There is no other way, it seems, in a deciduous world. True evergreenness does not exist: the word is only another term for the ability to overlap the old with the new.

As the past disappears, I keep getting lost.

Perhaps nothing is so fraught with significance as the human hand, this oldest tool with which man has dug his way from savagery, and with which he is constantly groping forward.

But people themselves alter so much, that there is something new to be observed in them for ever.

Yes, replied Darcy, who could contain himself no longer, but that was when I first knew her; for it is many months since I have considered her as one of the handsomest women of my acquaintance.

It has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began. But I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.

What one means one day, you know, one may not mean the next. Circumstances change, opinions alter.