Quotes About Evolution

It is natural human impulse to think of evolution as a long chain of improvements, of a never-ending advance towards largeness and complexity in a word, towards us. We flatter ourselves. Most of the real diversity in evolution has been small-scale. We large things are just flukes an interesting side branch.

I assume he was descended from apes like all the rest of us, but clearly in his case it had been a fairly gentle slope.

In those days kitchen matches were heavy-duty implementsmore like signal flares than the weedy sticks we get today. You could strike them on any hard surface and fling them at least fifteen feet and they wouldnt go out. Indeed, even when being beaten vigorously with two hands, as when lodged on the front of ones sweater, they seemed positively determined not to fail.

Weep not that the world changes -did it keep a stable changeless state, 'twere cause indeed to weep.

Alice for short. A diochronism. (Title of novel)

It seems to me a proof of the small advance our race has made in true wisdom, that we find it so hard to give up doing anything we have meant to do.

Change starts when someone sees the next step.

I am you might say, chemically altered.

We learn something every day, and lots of times it's that what we learned the day before was wrong.

At one time the benevolent affections embrace merely the family, soon the circle expanding includes first a class, then a nation, then a coalition of nations, then all humanity, and finally, its influence is felt in the dealings of man with the animal world.

Error is discipline through which we advance.

The resources of civilization are not yet exhausted.

You cannot fight against the future. Time is on our side.

What's wrong with this world is, it's not finished yet. It is not competed to the point where man can put his final signature to the job and say, "It is finished. We made it and it works."

One of the indictments of civilizations is that happiness and intelligence are so rarely found in the same person.

The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed. The Economist, December 4, 2003

The future has already arrived. It's just not evenly distributed yet.

I think education is both using and improving knowledge and that changes the whole picture.

The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away.

The idea of the "free man," as we understand it, is the product of a revolt against mediaeval and feudal ideas; and

I've been doing a lot of learning from mistakes, first and foremost, and building off that.

One day might be different from another, but there ain't much difference when they're put together.

One day might be different from another, but there ain't much difference when they're put together. September 14, 1911: Writer and teacher William Armstrong wrote celebrated children's books including the Newbery Medal-winning Sounder, about an African American sharecropper family with a loud and loyal hound, inspired by Odysseus' dog Argus. Armstrong was born in Virginia 102 years ago today.

Our civilization will, of course, be "playing God" in an ultimate sense of the phrase: evolving a greater intelligence than currently exists on earth. It behooves us to be a considerate creator, wise to the world and its fragile nature, sensitive to the needs for stable footings that will prevent backsliding -- and keep that house of cards we call civilization from collapsing.