Quotes About Evolution

Times change, and wars change. But men don't change, do they?

So the more things remain the same, the more they change after all- plus c'est la meme, plus ca change.

There isn't any question that we are conforming in every possible way to everything that's happening and everything that's going to happen.

I was the walrus, but now I am John...and so my friends, you'll just have to carry on. The dream is over.

We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life.

They went from regarding these compromises as regrettable to considering them necessary, then normal, then even desirable.

Scale sets the ranges within which experience accrues. If, in evolution, edges of chaos reward adaptation; if, in history, adaptation fortifies resilience; and if, in individuals, resilience accommodates unknowns

I marvel at animal behaviour but it never surprises me. Nature has had a long time to hone its secret skills.

All blue-eyed people are mutants. The first ones appeared as recently as 5,000 years ago.

Information is fleeting. Human records are broken; new particles are discovered; fresh historical documents come to light. Dinosaurs turn out not to be giant grey iguanas after all, but multicoloured feathery proto-birds of all shapes and sizes. Right now, even the daddy of all facts, the Big Bang theory, is looking wobbly.

Kangaroos have three vaginas.

The number of Homo sapiens sapiens that have ever lived, fought, loved, fussed pottered and finally died over the last 100,000 years is around ninety billion.

Before dentists' chairs were invented, the patient's head was clenched between the surgeon's knees.

Cockroaches appeared 120 million years before the dinosaurs.

You should never, ever be understood completely. That's like the kiss of death, isn't it? It's a full stop. I don't ever think you should put full stops on thoughts. They change.

All influenza viruses mutate constantly

Biological systems are the product not of logic but of evolution, an inelegant process. Life does not choose the logically best design to meet a new situation. It adapts what already exists. Much of the human genome includes genes which are "conserved"; i.e., which are essentially the same as those in much simpler species. Evolution has built upon what already exists.

Reassortment mixes some of the segments of the genes of one virus with some from the other. It is like shuffling two different decks of cards together, then making up a new deck with cards from each one. This creates an entirely new hybrid virus, which increases the chances of a virus jumping from one species to another.

But the virus can adapt to man. It can do so directly, with an entire animal virus jumping to humans and adapting with a simple mutation. It can also happen indirectly. For one final and unusual attribute of the influenza virus makes it particularly adept at moving from species to species.

the prevailing paradigm tends to freeze progress

Public health experts monitor this drift and each year adjust the flu vaccine to try to keep pace. But they will never be able to match up perfectly, because even if they predict the direction of mutation, the fact that influenza viruses exist as mutating swarms means some will always be different enough to evade both the vaccine and the immune system.

In fact, biology is chaos. Biological systems are the product not of logic but of evolution, an inelegant process.

Natural selection is intolerant of idle verbosity.

pace of genetic selection, recombination