Quotes About Evolution

Los principales elementos mortíferos para la humanidad en nuestra historia reciente -la viruela, la gripe, la tuberculosis, la malaria, la peste, el sarampión y el cólera- son enfermedades contagiosas que evolucionaron a partir de enfermedades de los animales, aún cuando la mayoría de los microbios responsables de nuestras enfermedades epidémicas estén ahora, paradójicamente, casi limitados a los seres humanos.

don't know whether Pertamina policies have changed since then.

THE LIMITED USES and users of early writing suggest why writing appeared so late in human evolution.

About 15,000 years ago, the American West looked much as Africa's Serengeti Plains do today, with herds of elephants and horses pursued by lions and cheetahs, and joined by members of such exotic species as camels and giant ground sloths.

This very unequal distribution of wild ancestral species among the continents became an important reason why Eurasians, rather than peoples of other continents, were the ones to end up with guns, germs, and steel.

But big mammal domestication virtually ended 4,500 years ago. By then, all of the world's 148 candidate big species must have been tested innumerable times, with the result that only a few passed the test and no other suitable ones remained.

BECAUSE TECHNOLOGY BEGETS more technology, the importance of an invention's diffusion potentially exceeds the importance of the original invention.

these differences between the Fertile Crescent, New Guinea, and the eastern United States followed straightforwardly from the differing suites of wild plant and animal species available for domestication, not from limitations of the peoples themselves.

Perhaps the biggest of these unsolved problems is to establish human history as a historical science, on a par with recognized historical sciences such as evolutionary biology, geology, and climatology. The study of human history does pose real difficulties, but those recognized historical sciences encounter some of the same challenges. Hence the methods developed in some of these other fields may also prove useful in the field of human history.

A horizontal arrow indicates that the attribute varies between less and more complex societies of that type.

Australia / New Guinea today has no equally large mammals, in fact no mammal larger than 100-pound kangaroos. But Australia / New Guinea formerly had its own suite of diverse big mammals, including giant kangaroos, rhinolike marsupials called diprotodonts and reaching the size of a cow, and a marsupial "leopard." It also formerly had a 400-pound ostrichlike flightless bird, plus some impressively big reptiles, including a one-ton lizard, a giant python, and land-dwelling crocodiles.

Thus, we can finally rephrase the question about the modern world's inequalities as follows: 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.

That contrast between the immediate virtues of wheat and barley and the difficulties posed by teosinte may have been a significant factor in the differing developments of New World and Eurasian human societies.

Only after about 20 years did Edison reluctantly concede that the main use of his phonograph was to record and play music.

1885 did engines improve to the point that Gottfried Daimler got around to installing one on a bicycle to create the first motorcycle;

he waited until 1896 to build the first truck.

Today the most numerous Native American tribe in the United States is the Navajo, who on European arrival were just one of several hundred tribes. But the Navajo proved especially resilient and able to deal selectively with innovation. They incorporated Western dyes into their weaving, became silversmiths and ranchers, and now drive trucks while continuing to live in traditional dwellings

One reason why technology tends to catalyze itself is that advances depend upon previous mastery of simpler problems.

La historia siguió trayectorias distintas para diferentes pueblos debido a las diferencias existentes en los entornos de los pueblos, no debido a diferencias biológicas entre los propios pueblos».

In this long history of accelerating development, one can single out two especially significant jumps. The first, occurring between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago, probably was made possible by genetic changes in our bodies: namely, by evolution of the modern anatomy permitting modern speech or modern brain function, or both. That jump led to bone tools, single-purpose stone tools, and compound tools.

diseases represent evolution in progress, and microbes adapt by natural selection to new hosts and vectors.

This bidirectional link between food production and population density explains the paradox that food production, while increasing the quantity of edible calories per acre, left the food producers less well nourished than the hunter-gatherers whom they succeeded. That paradox developed because human population densities rose slightly more steeply than did the availability of food.

Those protohumans are generally known as Australopithecus africanus, Homo habilis, and Homo erectus, which apparently evolved into each other in that sequence.

Our modern acorn squashes and summer squashes are derived from those American squashes domesticated thousands of years ago.