Quotes About Evolution

Chinese culture is still so great in Japan and Korea that Japan has no thought of discarding its Chinese-derived writing system despite its drawbacks for representing Japanese speech, while Korea is only now replacing its clumsy Chinese-derived writing with its wonderful indigenous han'g?l alphabet.

or just inventing a new letter (as our medieval ancestors did when they created the new letters j, u, and w).

Plant domestication may be defined as growing a plant and thereby, consciously or unconsciously, causing it to change genetically from its wild ancestor in ways making it more useful to human consumers.

The major killers of humanity throughout our recent history—smallpox, flu, tuberculosis, malaria, plague, measles, and cholera—are infectious diseases that evolved from diseases of animals, even though most of the microbes responsible for our own epidemic illnesses are paradoxically now almost confined to humans.

Jared Diamond

Lima beans, watermelons, potatoes, eggplants, and cabbages are among the many other familiar crops whose wild ancestors were bitter or poisonous, and

plant domestication is not a matter of hunter-gatherers' domesticating a single plant and otherwise carrying on unchanged with their nomadic lifestyle.

from our point of view, genital sores, diarrhea, and coughing are "symptoms of disease." From a germ's point of view, they're clever evolutionary strategies to broadcast the germ. That's why it's in the germ's interests to "make us sick." But why should a germ evolve the apparently self-defeating strategy of killing its host?

The daddy-at-home theory posits that concealed ovulation evolved to promote monogamy, to force the man to stay home, and thus to bolster his certainty about his paternity of his wife's children. The many-fathers theory instead posits that concealed ovulation evolved to give the women access to many sex partners and thus to leave many men uncertain as to whether they sired her children.

why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents? Those disparate rates constitute history's broadest pattern and my book's subject. While this book is thus ultimately

New signs were created by combining old signs to produce new meanings: for example, the sign for head was combined with the sign for bread in order to produce a sign signifying eat.

Similarly, throughout human history farmers have tended to despise hunter-gatherers as primitive, hunter-gatherers have despised farmers as ignorant, and herders have despised both.

After people reached Australia, that continent lost its giant kangaroos, its 'marsupial lion', and other giant marsupials.

human genetic diversity is highest in Africa; perhaps more-diverse humans would collectively produce more-diverse inventions.

natural selection promoting genes for intelligence has probably been far more ruthless in New Guinea than in more densely populated, politically complex societies, where natural selection for body chemistry was instead more potent.

The famous Java Homo erectus fossils prove that humans have occupied at least western Indonesia for a million years.

The first human ancestor to spread beyond Africa was Homo erectus, as is attested by fossils discovered on the Southeast Asian island of Java and conventionally known as Java man

That is, the adoption of food production exemplifies what is termed an autocatalytic process—one that catalyzes itself in a positive feedback cycle, going faster and faster once it has started.

Many modern alphabets, including ours, retain with minor modifications that original sequence (and, in the case of Greek, even the letters' original names: alpha, beta, gamma, delta, and so on) over 3,000 years later. One

The first cameras, typewriters, and television sets were as awful as Otto's seven-foot-tall gas engine. That makes it difficult for an inventor to foresee whether his or her awful prototype might eventually find a use and thus warrant more time and expense to develop it.

For example, compared with hunter-gatherers, citizens of modern industrialized states enjoy better medical care, lower risk of death by homicide, and a longer life span, but receive much less social support from friendships and extended families. My motive for investigating these geographic differences in human societies is not to celebrate one type of society over another but simply to understand what happened in history.

Nosotros y nuestros patógenos estamos encerrados ahora en una escalada de competición evolutiva, con la muerte de un contendiente como precio de la derrota y con la selección natural desempeñando el papel de árbitro.

Probably all humans lived in bands until at least 40,000 years ago, and most still did as recently as 11,000 years ago.

example, compared with hunter-gatherers, citizens of modern industrialized states enjoy better medical care, lower risk of death by homicide, and a longer life span