Quotes About Evolution

Thus, questions of the animal origins of human disease lie behind the broadest pattern of human history, and behind some of the most important issues in human health today. (Think of AIDS, an explosively spreading human disease that appears to have evolved from a virus resident in wild African monkeys.) This

In an epidemic those people with genes for resistance to that particular microbe are more likely to survive than are people lacking such genes. As a result, over the course of history, human populations repeatedly exposed to a particular pathogen have come to consist of a higher proportion of individuals with those genes for resistance—just because unfortunate individuals without the genes were less likely to survive to pass their genes on to babies.

As a result, over the course of history, human populations repeatedly exposed to a particular pathogen have come to consist of a higher proportion of individuals with those genes for resistance—just because unfortunate individuals without the genes were less likely to survive to pass their genes on to babies.

One suggested function of the first gardens of nearly 11,000 years ago was to provide a reliable reserve larder as insurance in case wild food supplies failed.

El fanatismo en la guerra, del tipo que impulsó las conquistas cristianas e islámicas que conocemos por la historia, fue probablemente desconocido en la Tierra hasta el surgimiento de las jefaturas y, sobre todo, de los estados en los últimos 6.000 años.

food production was indirectly a prerequisite for the development of guns, germs, and steel.

For example, typhus was initially transmitted between rats by rat fleas, which sufficed for a while to transfer typhus from rats to humans. Eventually, typhus microbes discovered that human body lice offered a much more efficient method of traveling directly between humans. Now that Americans have mostly deloused themselves, typhus has discovered a new route into us: by infecting eastern North American flying squirrels and then transferring to people whose attics harbor flying squirrels.

Different peoples acquired food production at different times in prehistory.

This trait has direct animal precursors – namely, the contests between competing individuals and groups that, in many species besides our own, may be resolved by murder.

shared among all of those types of crisis, whatever their cause, is the sense that something important about one's current approach to life isn't working, and that one has to find a new approach.

Two million years ago, several proto-human lineages had coexisted side by side until a shake-up left only one. It now appears that a similar shake-up occurred within the last 60,000 years, and that all of us alive in the world today are descended from the winner of that upheaval. What was the last missing ingredient whose acquisition helped our ancestor to win?

That was part of the reason why my 1959 crisis was so traumatic to me: it was my first acute life crisis. By comparison, my 1980 and 2000 professional crises were un-traumatic. I did eventually switch career directions from membrane physiology to evolutionary physiology around 1980, and from physiology to geography after 2000. But those decisions weren't painful, because I had come to assume from my previous experience that things would probably turn out OK.

big-bang reproduction, or semelparity: a single reproductive effort, followed by preprogrammed death.

But the largest number of primate species--thirty-four--have a promiscuous system in which females routinely associate and copulate with multiple males.

suggests that tribes were emerging in some areas by at least 13,000 years ago. In recent times tribes have still been widespread in parts of New Guinea and Amazonia.

If circumstances change, your decisions can change. Decisions are temporary.

Process helps make sense of change, but blindly following a process is a recipe for disaster

El cambio es tanto un arte como una ciencia

If you truly want to understand something, try to change it - Kurt Lewin -

Disruptive innovation is good. Disruption for the sake of disruption is not. Culture

Lean Change Management moves the slider for managing change from using plan-driven aproaches to feedback-driven aproaches

we often find out that what we thought we wanted before we got it is no longer what we really want once we have it.

Have you ever wondered how nostalgia isnt what it used to be?

Cats aren't really friendly, they're just cozying up to the dominant life-form as a hedge against extinction.