Quotes About Evolution

They're not post-Human. Not yet." "How can you tell?" It was only half a joke. "Because otherwise we wouldn't be able to talk to them at all.

The moved and the shaken.

By now it's got as much in common with its origins as a humpback whale would have with the sperm cells from a therapsid lizard. Still

Nowadays it seemed like half the technical data on the planet were being stored genetically. Try sequencing a lung fluke and it was even money whether the base pairs you read would code for protein or the technical specs on the Denver sewer system.

And from those humble beginnings we learned to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favors the paranoid.

Dan, you gotta let go of this whole self thing. Identity changes by the second, you turn into someone else every time a new thought rewires your brain. You're already a different person than you were ten minutes ago.

nouveaux undead

It turns out the unconscious mind is better at making complex decisions than is the conscious mind114. The conscious mind just can't handle as many variables, apparently. Quoth one of the researchers: "At some point in our evolution, we started to make decisions consciously, and we're not very good at it."115

protocadherin

He felt like some overgrown pupa plagued by second thoughts, trying to climb back into its husk.

We can use logic when we want to, of course. We have tools of reason at our command; but according to at least some experts1 we have those tools not to glean truth from falsehood but to help us win arguments; to make others do what we want; to use as a weapon. It's rhetoric and manipulation that evolution selected for: logic just tagged along as a side effect. Sweeping oratory, rational debate, it's all just a way to bend others to your will.

If we're so unfit, why haven't we gone extinct? Why? Because natural selection takes time, and luck plays a role. The game isn't over. The game is never over; and so, neither can there be any winners. There are only those who haven't yet lost.

That's like a chimp asking why those hairless apes aren't slinging bigger feces than everyone else, if they're so damned clever.

We're the goddamned Kalashnikovs of thinking meat.

when a lemur makes a human, it doesn't matter how many lemur chains and lemur rules and lemur constraints she imposes. She's simply, computationally incapable of seeing all the angles that her smarter creation can take in at a glance.

conspecifics

SPECIES USED TO GO EXTINCT. NOW THEY GO ON HIATUS. —Deborah MacLennan, Tables of our Reconstruction

Human nature was becoming an assembly-line edit, Humanity itself increasingly relegated from production to product.

What is Human history, if not an ongoing succession of greater technologies grinding lesser ones beneath their boots? But

And from those humble beginnings we learned to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favors the paranoid. Even

You have a naïve understanding of evolutionary processes. There's no such thing as survival of the fittest. Survival of the most adequate, maybe. It doesn't matter whether a solution's optimal. All that matters is whether it beats the alternatives.

ALL ANIMALS ARE UNDER STRINGENT SELECTION PRESSURE TO BE AS STUPID AS THEY CAN GET AWAY WITH.

Extended periods of lungfish-like dormancy8 (the "undead" state) developed in response, as a means of reducing vampires' energetic needs. Vampires

Any race which can't rise above its own brutal instincts will wipe itself out long before it learns to bridge the interstellar gulf.