Quotes About Evolution

Theologians have by this time stretched their minds so as to embrace the darwinian facts, and yet to interpret them as still showing divine purpose. It used to be a question of purpose AGAINST mechanism, of one OR the other. It was as if one should say My shoes are evidently designed to fit my feet, hence it is impossible that they should have been produced by machinery.

What was bright and exciting becomes weary, flat, and unprofitable.

Blood mixture and the resultant drop in the racial level is the sole cause of the dying out of old cultures; for men do not perish as a result of lost wars, but by the loss of that force of resistance which is continued only in pure blood. All who are not of good race in this world are chaff.15

I differ with myself then agree, like the rock that was broken and cemented together. I change my opinion.

Technically, our name, to those who speak science, is Homo sapiens— wise person. But we have been described in many other ways. Homo narrans, juridicus, ludens, diaspora: we are storytelling, legal, game-playing, scattered people, too. True but incomplete. That old phrase has the secret. We are all, have always been, will always be, Homo vorago aperientis: person before whom opens a vast & awesome hole.

Now the Ariekei were learning to speak, and to think, and it hurt.

Death isn't what it used to be

When he had first started at the center, he had liked to think that he was unexpectedly cool-looking for such a job. Now he knew that he surprised no one, that no one expected scientists to look like scientists anymore.

I don't want to be a simile anymore," I said. "I want to be a metaphor.

Walls and ceilings moved with ratcheting mechanical life like the offspring of chains and crabs.

His manager taught him that words change with time, by single letters or more, sometimes their whole roots switching—a "y" to an "e" in a name for power, "sun-writing" becomes "light-drawing." The man eventually gave him this whole other tongue, and he revisited and at last learned from those cuttings about immense foreign wars.

The assumption – and I think it's correct – is that the technology is going to happen anyway, so the best thing is to get it distributed as quickly as possible and see what people use it for, and keep an eye out for any problems that arise.

Tutte le note erano come a strati, un palinsesto di interpretazione in progresso. Feci archeologia.

utterly human moan started from him, and it grew and grew until it became a bird

One moment it was a calculating machine, attempting dispassionately to keep up with the gouts of data. And then awash in those gouts, something metal twitched and a patter of valves sounded that had not been instructed by those numbers. A loop of data was self-generated by the analytical engine. The processor reflected on its creation in a hiss of high-pressure steam. One moment it was a calculating machine. The next, it thought.

staggering out of Language, into language

People have wanted to narrate since first we banged rocks together & wondered about fire. There'll be tellings as long as there are any of us here, until the stars disappear one by one like turned-out lights.

My sustenance is information. My interventions are hidden. I increase as I learn. I compute, so I am.

Everything has changed. I cannot be used anymore. Those days are over. I know too much. What I do now, I do for me.

I don't want to be a simile anymore,' I said. "I want to be a metaphor.

In his long evolutionary history, man has scored few greater successes than his creation of human society. For it is on that primeval achievement that he has built those special qualities of mind and of behaviour which, in his own view at least, separate him from lower forms of life. If we sometimes tend to overlook this fact it is only because we have lived so long under the protective ambience of society that we have come to take its benefits for granted.

Where I come from in the Eastern Region, life is still -- well, things are changing very fast but if one is interested, one can still see signs of what life used to look like.

When a tradition gathers enough strength to go on for centuries, you don't just turn it off one day.

How can you make your change a matter of identity rather than a matter of consequences?