Quotes About Evolution

Survival, in the cool economics of biology, means simply the persistence of one's own genes in the generations to follow.

I am a member of a fragile species, still new to the earth, the youngest creatures of any scale, here only a few moments as evolutionary time is measured, a juvenile species, a child of a species… in real danger at the moment of leaving behind only a thin layer of our fossils, radioactive at that.

Medical knowledge and technical savvy are biodegradable. The sort of medicine that was practiced in Boston or New York or Atlanta fifty years ago would be as strange to a medical student or intern today as the ceremonial dance of a !Kung San tribe would seem to a rock festival audience in Hackensack.

At this early stage in our evolution, now through our infancy and into our childhood and then, with luck, our growing up, what our species needs most of all, right now, is simply a future.

We pass the word around we ponder how the case is put by different people, we read the poetry we meditate over the literature we play the music we change our minds we reach an understanding. Society evolves this way, not by shouting each other down, but by the unique capacity of unique, individual human beings to comprehend each other.

All of today's DNA, strung through all the cells of the earth, is simply an extension and elaboration of [the] first molecule.

Somewhere along the line, nucleotides were edged apart to let new ones in; maybe viruses moved in, carrying along bits of other, foreign genomes; radiation from the sun or from outer space caused tiny cracks in the molecule, and humanity was conceived." – Lewis Thomas

We have come a long way on that old molecule.

Arriving at cell theory has been considered even more important to biology than Darwin's theory of evolution

Finally, we can contemplate the evolution of our understanding of developmental biology. Progress has been impressive but due to the complexity of cells with all their proteins and other molecules interacting, there is still much to be learned. It is likely that in the next 50 years, given the genes and structure of a fertilized egg, it will be possible to reliably compute the details of that organism's development and just what the adult would be.

It is not birth, marriage, or death, but gastrulation which is truly the most important time in your life

The Relativity theory, the copernican upheaval, or any great scientific convulsion, leaves a new landscape. There is a period of stunned dreariness; then people begin, antlike, the building of a new human world. They soon forget the last disturbance. But from these shocks they derive a slightly augmented vocabulary, a new blind spot in their vision, a few new blepharospasms or tics, and perhaps a revised method of computing time.

Feminism was recognized by the average man as a conflict in which it was impossible for a man, as a chivalrous gentleman ... as a highly evolved citizen of a highly civilized community, to refuse the claim of this better half to self-determination.

Every town, every book, is a way to say, look, there's a new way, a different way. Every book in a bookstore is a fresh beginning. Every book is the next iteration of a very old story. Every bookstore, therefore, is like a safe? deposit box for civilization.

I didn't always want to be a dad.

It's funny, but you get to a time in your life when you think you have all the friends you will ever have.

O amor apaixonado não se extingue, transformando-se noutras paixões, ódio, ciúme, desilusão.

Did anyone really know their child? Your child was a little stranger, constantly changing, disappearing and reintroducing himself to you. New personality traits could appear overnight.

Relationships don't stay the same. There isn't time.

But Grace quite likes the fact that you can think something is one way all your life, and it turns out you're wrong, it can be something else entirely. It makes her feel free. Nothing is rigid. Things change. You can change your mind. You can change your thinking.

Early love is exciting and exhilarating. It's light and bubbly. Anyone can love like that. But love after three children, after a separation and a near-divorce, after you've hurt each other and forgiven each other, bored each other and surprised each other, after you've seen the worst and the best—well, that sort of a love is ineffable. It deserves its own word.

Once, she'd loved to receive flowers. Now it was like being handed a series of tasks: Find the vase. Cut the stems. Arrange them like so.

Sometimes your life changes so slowly and imperceptibly that you don't notice it at all until one day you wake up and think: How did I get here?

One minute they were driving her home from the hospital, a tiny, wrinkled, squalling baby. The next she was all legs and cheekbones and opinions. Whoosh. It made Alice's head spin.