Quotes About Evolution

The time was when a library was very like a museum and the librarian a mouser in musty books. The time is when the library is a school and the librarian in the highest sense a teacher.

Once again we see not only additions to the English word-hoard but new ideas being introduced or current ideas being given a name – 'humanity', 'pollute', which then, as words often do, took on a larger and more complex life. New words are new worlds. You call them up and if they are strong enough, they keep in step with change and along the way describe more and more, provide new insights, evolve on the tongue and on the page.

Estuary English creeps in and shows no sign of ebbing.

English, like water, will find its own level. The language itself through usage and natural selection will see that what is survivable will survive.

That, too, is part of this adventure — there are both casualties and survivors as this hungry creature, English, demanded more and more subjects.

One aspect of English which has been a recurring feature in its history is the way a word will be adapted from one age to another so that a 'chip' can go from wood to silicon, include golf and a slight and feature as fifty per cent of a British diet.

Word endings fell away. Prepositions came in which took the language away from the Germanic and made it more English. Instead of adding a lump on the end of words, you could use 'to' or 'with'. 'I gave the dog to my daughter.' 'I cut the meat with my knife.' The order of words became important and prepositions became more common as signposts around sentences.

In other words, Passer domesticus has become an urban species because it was already adapted to a lifestyle that, purely by accident, prepared it for the niches that we have created in cities. The urban environment offers conditions that happen to resemble one or more aspects of a species' way of living in pre-urban times. And it is those species that are pre-adapted to the novel niches in the city. They are the first to move in.

Roughly, with every tenfold increase in island size, the number of species you find there doubles.

Cities are the world's new vacant niches, and the blackbird is one species that has embarked on the road toward speciating to maximize its profits from this horn of plenty,

That is why urban evolution can proceed so rapidly: the animals and plants that need to adapt to whatever new feature humans release in their urban environment do not need to wait for the right mutations to come along. Mostly, the necessary gene variants are already there, waiting in the wings of the standing genetic variation. It only takes natural selection to bring them out into the limelight, and give them a chance to shine.

The closest relatives of bed bugs (Cimex lectularius) are parasites of cave bats—which indicates that that was also bed bugs' original niche.

What she means is that cities exchange not only species, but also the human inventions that make those cities tick and that urban organisms must adapt to.

Phylogeography began in the 1980s as a way to tell the evolutionary history of natural populations of animals and plants. It usually involves looking at a large number of "markers," variable bits in the DNA of a species, for a lot of specimens from different parts of a species' area of distribution. Phylogeographers can then use such rich information on the genetic make-up of a species to trace back its history.

The term machine learning entered the lexicon in 1959, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).

For all we know, our ancestors may have had better reproductive success not because they were smart, but because they were emotionally sensitive, dynamically moody, and ridden with anxiety. In other words, it makes sense to hold up an evolutionary lens to mental disorders because they might not be disorders at all, but adaptations.

Perhaps periods of anxiety, sadness, panic, and sheer craziness are just part of the mental continuum that nature has provided to help us stay alive, make babies, and pass on genes.

His was not the hatred that arises suddenly like a storm and as suddenly abates. It was, once the initial shock of anger and pain was over, a calculated thing that grew in a bloodless way.

every situation comes with a learning experience.so stop repeating the same mistakes & learn something.

As nossas estradas já tiveram a timidez dos rios e a suavidade das mulheres. E pediam licença antes de nascer. Agora, as estradas tomam posse da paisagem e estendem as suas grandes pernas sobre o Tempo, como fazem os donos do mundo.

Todo final es un principio, decía Adjiru Kapitamoro.

Então, as letras, uma por uma, se vão convertendo em grãos de areia e, aos poucos, todos meus escritos se vão transformando em páginas de terra.

A primavera cabe dentro do grilo. Cigarras se alfabetizam de silêncios. No liso da parede, a osga se prepara para transparências, adquire a forma do nada. Enquanto o ramo vai transitando para camaleão.

As pálpebras são asas que nos restaram de um tempo anterior, quando fomos aves. E as pestanas são as sobreviventes plumas.