Quotes About Evolution

The greatest discovery any alien anthropologist could make about our culture is our overriding response to failure: If it didn't work last year, do it AGAIN this year (and if possible do it MORE)

Y]our agricultural revolution is not an event like the Trojan War, isolated in the distant past and without relevance to your lives today. The work begun by those neolithic farmers in the Near East has been carried forward from one generation to the next without a single break, right into the present moment. It's the foundation of your vast civilization today in exactly the same way that it was the foundation of the very first farming village.

Yes,I'm afraid you're right. Trial and error isn't a bad way to learn how to build an aircraft,but it can be a disastrous way to learn how to build a civilization.

The community of life that we see here at any given time isn't just a random collection. It's a collection of successes. It's the remainder that is left over when the failures have disappeared.

The world will not be saved by old minds with new programs. If the world is saved, it will be saved by new minds—with no programs.

The rules that govern competition between species are (and must be) very different from the rules that govern competition within species.

No invention ever comes into being fully developed in a single step, from nothing. Ten thousand inventions had to be in place before Edison could invent the electric light-bulb.

This is what creationists say of evolution, that it's "only" a theory, it hasn't been proved, as though this in itself is grounds for dismissal. This misrepresents the point of formulating a theory, which is to make sense of some body of evidence.

Every one of the Leavers' ways came into being by evolution, by a process of testing that began even before people had a word for it. No one said, 'Okay, let's form a committee to write up a set of laws for us to follow.' None of these cultures were inventions. But that's what all our lawgivers give us--inventions. Contrivances. Not things that have proved out over thousands of generations, but rather arbitrary pronouncements about the one right way to live.

Man's place is to be the first without being the last . . . . [I]t's man's place to be the teacher of all the rest who are capable of becoming what he's become.

And so your account of creation ends, 'And finally man appeared.'

Among the primates only humans are hunters, because among the primates only humans have the biological equipment to make hunting a mainstay of life—and that equipment is strictly intellectual.

The evolution of society is substantially a process of mental adaptation on the part of individuals under the stress of circumstances which will no longer tolerate habits of thought formed under and conforming to a different set of circumstances in the past.

So in a way it was true: as I grew, he shrank. And by this logic one day I would become a giant, and Edward would become nothing, invisible in the world. B

He was just changing, transforming himself into something new and different to carry his life forward in. All

The story goes like this: he falls in love with Specter first, then he falls in love with Jenny Hill. L

And that's when I discovered that my father hadn't been dying after all. He was just changing, transforming himself into something new and different to carry his life forward in.

The "triad"—the convergence of electric vehicles, ride hailing, and self-driving cars—is far from sure.

Failure is not fatal, but failing to change might be.

I am a product of my failures.

People always fear change. People feared electricity when it was invented, didn't they? People feared coal, they feared gas-powered engines… There will always be ignorance, and ignorance leads to fear. But with time, people will come to accept their silicon masters.

"A clever girl may pass through the phase of foolish miss on the way to sensible woman."

Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.

It's not about what i is, it's about what it can become.