Quotes About Evolution

The first sexual division comes about when nurture is made the exclusive concern of women. This cannot happen until a society becomes industrial; in hunting and gathering and in agricultural societies, men are of necessity also involved in nurture.

My life, though, has been something (as only now at last I am able to see), but it is something that it has made of itself, not something that I have made of it. All I seem to have done is avoid wherever I could (so far) the man across the desk—for (so far) the world has afforded a little room for a few of us, lucky or blessed, to go around him. And now I wonder if I can die quickly enough and secretly enough to make the final evasion.

help you realize that your present will someday be someone else's past.

If nothing ever changed, there would be no such things as butterflies.

But there was no final firestorm, just a long night of negotiations where we tried to get our old selves back, to disown who we'd been for the past three months, because we'd been the wrong people all along.

The lessons he learned were diligently applied to modify his methods, resulting in a continuous research loop

Whether we like it or not, modern ways are going to alter and in part destroy traditional customs and values.

Eumenes had been with her more than 400 years, Lollia nearly as long. Until now not one of her transformations had failed to last 200 years. Was she getting worse at it, or was the strength of the human stock in decline?

A soul tool is being used to make physical changes that will in future generations enable contact across the bridge.

Pinch, Bijker, and Hughes note that inclusion in a group, organization, or bureaucracy dampens the originality of inventors and innovators (Bijker, this volume). High inclusion brings mission orientation or commitment to incremental improvements in the evolving technological system with which the group, organization, or bureaucracy has identified. The

The second biological lesson of history is that life is selection. In the competition for food or mates or power some organisms succeed and some fail. In the struggle for existence some individuals are better equipped than others to meet the tests of survival.

Inequality is not only natural and inborn, it grows with the complexity of civilization.

Man's sins may be the relics of his rise rather than the stigmata of his fall.

Civilization exists by geologic consent, subject to change without notice.

Plato's reduction of political evolution to a sequence of monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, and dictatorship found another illustration in the history of Rome.

It was woman who gave man agriculture and the home; she domesticated man as she domesticated the sheep and the pig.

Evolution in man during recorded time has been social rather than biological: it has proceeded not by heritable variations in the species, but mostly by economic, political, intellectual, and moral innovation transmitted to individuals and generations by imitation, custom, or education.

As the contrast between the militant and the industrial types is indicated by inversion of the belief that individuals exist for the benefit of the state into the belief that the state exists for the benefit of individuals; so the contrast between the industrial type and the type likely to be evolved from it is indicated by inversion of the belief that life is for work into the belief that work is for life.

So the first biological lesson of history is that life is competition.

Social evolution is an interplay of custom with origination.

life must breed.

Nothing is lost in history: sooner or later every creative idea finds opportunity and development, and adds its color to the flame of life.

Consequently—since there is a natural selection of institutions and ideas as well as of organisms and groups—the passage from hunting to agriculture brought a change from tribal property to family property; the most economical unit of production became the unit of ownership. As the family took on more and more a patriarchal form, with authority centralized in the oldest male, property became increasingly individualized, and personal bequest arose.

Agriculture, while generating civilization, led not only to private property but to slavery. In purely hunting communities slavery had been unknown; the hunter's wives and children sufficed to do the menial work.