Quotes About Evolution

I well remember writing to Louis about my first observations, describing how David Graybeard not only used bits of straw to fish for termites but actually stripped leaves from a stem and thus made a tool. And I remember too receiving the now oft-quoted telegram he sent in response to my letter: Now we must redefine tool, redefine Man, or accept chimpanzees as humans. There

You may not believe in evolution, and that's all right. How we humans came to be the way we are is far less important that how we should act now to get out of the mess we have made for ourselves.

Here was a chimpanzee using a tool... That was object modification-- the crude beginning of tool making.

Any little thing that brings us back into communion with the natural world and the spiritual power that permeates all life will help us to move a little further along the path of human moral and spiritual evolution.

Moral evolution, I think, is understanding how we should behave, how we should treat others, understanding justice, understanding the need for a more equitable society.

One could argue that the human intellect was the greatest mistake in evolution—a mistake that is now threatening all life on the planet.

Moral evolution, I think, is understanding how we should behave, how we should treat others, understanding justice, understanding the need for a more equitable society. Spiritual evolution is more about meditating on the mystery of creation and the Creator, asking who we are and why we are here and understanding how we are part of the amazing natural world-again Shakespeare says it beautifully when he talks of seeing 'books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.

enhances the orchid's reproductive success—but not his own! The best known of these cheats is the bee orchid—the flower looks and feels like a female bee and even has the same pheromones.

stand up against it. And even when they lose their lives, their voices still resonate long after they are gone, giving us inspiration and hope—hope in the ultimate goodness of this strange, conflicted human animal that evolved from an apelike creature some six million years ago.

we developed this ability to communicate with words.

survival of your own genes," I said.

He said that history takes two steps forward and one step back.

It was from a species long thought to be extinct—a species known only from the fossil record, a species that turned out to have survived for two hundred million years. Those trees, who came to be known as Wollemi pines, had been in that canyon, getting on with their lives, through seventeen Ice Ages!

Welwitschia mirabilis.

Imagine—this gangly plant, which Darwin likened to a duckbill platypus of the vegetable kingdom, has survived as a species, unchanged, for 135 to 205 million years. Originally its habitat was lush, moist forest, yet it has now adapted to a very different environment—the harsh Namib Desert.

It doesn't matter how many years go by, how grown-up we think we are, how much we presume we have changed or evolved, when we are back in our childhood homes, we become exactly who we have always been.

Shock doesn't hit all at once. I have learned.

Thoroughly unprepared, we take the step into the afternoon of life. Worse still, we take this step with the false presupposition that our truths and ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life's morning, for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true, at evening will have become a lie'.

If we keep doing what we've been doing, we will get what we have always got, and that isn't enough. I want something different for my life.

The definition of insanity is doing what you've always done and expecting different results.

However close you are, you know that's another friend you won't be seeing anymore. You won't have anything in common anymore, since you are not interested in babies, and they are no longer interested in life.

The definition of insanity is doing what you've always done and expecting different results.

Another thing: a living culture is forever changing, without losing itself as a framework and context of change. The reconstruction of a culture is not the same as its restoration.

There is no new world that you make without the old world.