Quotes About Evolution

Germany's crime is the greatest crime the world has ever known, because it is not on the scale of History: it is on the scale of Evolution.

No matter how politely one says it, we owe our existence to the farts of blue-green algae.

Our lives together, our duet, also continues to evolve, and even if we can't go back to how it was, we're designing a good life for us, in spite of everything.

Nature rarely wastes a winning strategy.

What remained would gradually acquire its own shape and dimension, but many of our favorite things, my favorite ways of being a couple, had vanished and it was no use pretending, hoping, wishing that he would return to his old self, and me to mine. [p. 156]

Why was it, she asked herself, that animals can sometimes subdue their predatory ways in only a few months, while humans, despite centuries of refinement, can quickly grow more savage than any beast?

If organs as elemental as brain and heart can be persuaded to regenerate, and others, like ears and corneas, can be fashioned from living ink, how will that change us as a species? Will the printing of organs affect our evolution? Could it alter our genes?

So couples relive romantic memories, families watch home movies, and friends catch up with each other, as if they've lagged behind on a trail. Sifting memory for saliences to report, they reveal how vital pieces of their identity have changed. Aging, we tailor memories to fit our evolving silhouette, and as life's vocabulary changes, memories change to fathom the new order. Lose your memory, and you may drift in an alien world.

Why was it, she asked herself, that animals can sometimes subdue their predatory ways in only a few months, while humans, despite centuries of refinement, can quickly grow more savage than any beast?

Smell was our first sense, and it was so successful that in time the small lump of olfactory tissue atop the nerve cord grew into a brain. Our cerebral hemispheres were originally buds from our olfactory stalks. We think because we smelled.

Because the aurochs went extinct in the 1600s, recent in evolutionary terms, Heck felt sure he could reconstruct it, and in so doing save it, too, from racial degeneration. He dreamt that, alongside the swastika, the bull might become synonymous with Nazism. Some drawings of the era showed the aurochs and a swastika joined in an emblem of ideological suavity combined with ferocious strength.

We're killing lots of dinosaurs though. The trains are helping." "The TRAINS are—" "Only one derailed so far," Urruah said cheerfully.

The history of education is a seemingly endless parade of "new ideas" that are actually old ideas renamed.

Much of what she found charming and refreshing about him at the outset of their relationship now bugged the hell out of her.

Diane Setterfield

I'd expected that I would expand to fit the experience automatically, that I would get my first glimpse of the person I was destined to be.

Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes—characters even—caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you.

We live like latecomers at the theatre; we must catch up as best we can, dividing the beginning from the shape of later events.

We had reached tipping point. It was no longer possible to call it a demolition site. Tomorrow, today perhaps, the workers would return and it would become a construction site. The past demolished, it was time for them to start building the future.

It was odd to think that only a few years ago she had been Helena Greville. It seemed a lot longer. When she thought about that girl now it was as if she was thinking about someone she used to know, and know quite well, but would never see again. Helena Greville was gone for good.

Six months ago a miraculous story had burst wildly and messily into the Swan; today it was neatened, pressed, and put away without a crease in it.

You leave the previous book with idea's and themes - characters even - caught in the fibers of your clothing - and when you open a new book, they are still with you.

There's no scientific basis for it." He'd go on about climate and exposure to sunlight and the beginning of agriculture and diet and all sorts of factors, but she was fascinated at the concept that so-called white people were simply descended from people whose environment left them with a need to absorb more vitamin D from the sun.

When I had finished dressing, I took another look in the same long mirror. There was the man who had come from Australia four months ago, a man in a good dark-gray suit, a white shirt, and a navy-blue silk tie; there was his shell, anyway. Inside I wasn't the same man, nor ever would be again.