Quotes About Evolution

Ultimately, in fact, they would enter into a kind of symbiosis with humans, forming a cohesive whole that would think more powerfully than any human being had ever thought and process data in ways that no machine could ever do by itself.

Technology isn't destiny, no matter how inexorable its evolution may seem; the way its capabilities are used is as much a matter of cultural choice and historical accident as politics is, or fashion.

However fierce the controversy surrounding its birth, the stored-program concept now ranks as one of the great ideas of the computer age—arguably the great idea.

In April 1974, for example, Intel introduced its 8-bit 8080 chip, the first microprocessor to come within shouting distance of, say, a 12-bit mini such as the PDP-8.

You can go extinct, or broke. But here we are on the edge of chaos because that's where, on average, we all do the best.

And when he finally plotted it all up, there it was: the number of cell types in an organism did indeed scale roughly as the square root of the number of genes it had.

M. Mitchell Waldrop

he had to find out what was important about self-reproduction, independent of the detailed biochemical machinery.

a new open-interface standard that would allow hardware and software to evolve independently.

By the summer of 1972, says Thacker, "it was personal-computer time, just like it was railroad time in the eighteen-fifties.

nearly a decade would pass before TCP/IP was stable enough for ARPA to shift the whole Arpanet over to it.

The Alto was certainly not the first personal computer; that honor has to go to Wes Clark's LINC, if not to Clark's TX-0, or even to Jay Forrester's Whirlwind. But it was the first machine that most of us would recognize as a personal computer.

By mid-1970, they had a preliminary version up and running. Somewhere along the way, moreover, their homebrew operating system had acquired a name. According to one version of the story, the name signified "one of whatever Multics was many of." According to another, it stood for "Multics without balls." But either way it came out the same: Unix.

By 1990 the Arpanet was history.

It is only because of problems that we grow mentally and spiritually.

By the same token, if conscience and empathy were impediments to the advancement of self-interest, then we would have evolved to be amoral sociopaths.

We also know that evolution crafted all life on the planet with natural selection and that we can capture the way it works with mathematics, distilling its essence into the form of equations.

Living, breathing creatures did not require a life force, or vital essence, to evolve but an extraordinary level of cooperation between molecules.

Before this insight, one might have been tempted to think of evolution as a completely random walk across a fitness landscape, in other words a series of steps in multidimensional sequence space where no region is more likely to be explored than any other region. But it turns out that, due to the power of selection and quasispecies, there are biases in evolution's walk through the genetic possibilities of life.

If... if there is reincarnation, it's about forward motion. It has to be, or else we would all be forever stuck in the past.

How we, as adults, come to be who we are, one layer at a time. How those early layers are the core that shapes and informs us but then each additional layer adds to our whole selves.

How do we change - within moments, the whole form of our habits and dispositions may become alien to us, and we almost cannot remember what we were.

It's important to see who you're growing into and who you used to be.

Pero siempre hay tiempo de cambiar. Siempre hay tiempo. Hasta que ya no hay.