Quotes About Evolution

In just the last few years we have learned that 85 percent of all people carry DNA from Neanderthals, an entirely different species that lived until 27,000 years ago. If the research on the human genome hasn't completely destroyed the idea of genetic purity, our newly discovered Neanderthal ancestors show how truly absurd the notion is.

Or, as Razib Khan, a geneticist and science blogger, put it, culture is chunky, whereas genes are creamy.

History," wrote the researchers, "is always ending today.

Today, the questions that remain most controversial in language evolution are the following: Was there one crucial gateway to language through which only humans have passed? Is there anything in the way language is processed by the brain that is unique to language, rather than a more general form of cognition? At what points in the trajectory of language evolution has natural selection come into play? Can any elements of the language suite be clearly identified as spandrels?

to be a person is to be constantly engaged in making yourself into that person

As we head to our last dinner, on a yacht, I am oddly nostalgic for that earlier, more guerrilla Cannes. I wonder if I'd sleep on the floor to get it back.

The serious readers are usually people who have swerved off course in their own first acts—who have gone through major changes in their lives.

Judged by single nucleotides polymorphisms (or SNP) in DNA, the difference between people and chimpanzees is 1.23 percent, compared to around 0.1 percent difference in SNPs between two randomly picked humans.

Once they're both gone, your parents' house instantly turns into a museum.

There is no squabbling so violent as that between people who accepted an idea yesterday and those who will accept the same idea tomorrow.

We know that we will never confront the exact same circumstances as previous revolutions. But we should also know that certain problems are persistent ones and that if we can't say what we would have done in the past we should not expect people to think much of our ability to face the future.

True surrender is giving up an old way for a new way.

One day I shall burst my bud of calm and blossom into hysteria.

No matter how deep we have gone, there is more.

I reread books to measure my degree of difference from myself.

To cling to the past is hypocrisy, because no one knows those moments.

When one cannot think of how to do things better one simply makes things bigger. The construction of the great pyramids in Egypt marked the end of the Old Kingdom. Bigger and bigger cathedrals and temples were built when the faithful became secure and comfortable. Dinosaurs, too, were an evolutionary dead end: the huge reptiles were replaced by small, energy-efficient mammals.

Millions of years ago, we evolved three basic drives: the sex drive, romantic love and attachment to a long-term partner. These circuits are deeply embedded in the human brain. They're going to survive as long as our species survives.

It was early summer. And everything, as it always does, began to heave and change.

memory movement of the 1990s.

crossing the lines, which is probably as good a definition of how social change happens as one can find.2

every professional was once a beginner

We have built our houses between what is fluid and what is fixed.

The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.