Quotes About Evolution

The planet turns. Time passes. We move forward even when we're standing still.

there are so many ways to move forward and only one way to stand still.

He told me we had to "move forward," which is a term that I've never understood. The planet turns. Time passes. We move forward even when we're standing still.

How does anyone know what's true or real? Things we once accepted as facts are now accepted as being wrong. The earth is not flat, smoking isn't good for us, Pluto isn't a planet, witches weren't burnt at the stake in Salem, and humans have more than five senses. Everything has a half-life—even facts.

t]he Darwinian argues that morality simply does not work (from a biological perspective), unless we believe that it is objective. Darwinian theory shows that, in fact, morality is a function of (subjective) feelings; but it shows also that we have (and must have) the illusion of objectivity. (Ruse 1998, 253; emphasis mine)

The similarity of architecture in organized, complex systems suggests that they all share universal requirements. They are designed to be "efficient, adaptive, evolvable, and robust.

Evolution by natural selection requires the copying of genetic records and the construction of proteins, but these processes themselves had to originate somehow.

Living matter seems to be playing an entirely different game than non-living matter, even though they are both made from the same stuff. Why is living matter different from non-living matter? Is it simply cheating, somehow violating the physical laws that we've come to understand govern non-living matter? Pattee argues that living matter is distinguished from non-living matter by its ability to replicate and to evolve over the course of time. So what does it take to replicate and evolve?

As evolutionary neurobiologists Leah Krubitzer and Jon Kaas put it, Although the phenotype generated is context-dependent, the ability to respond to the context has a genetic basis. . . . In essence, the Baldwin effect is the evolution of the ability to respond optimally to a particular environment. Thus, genes for plasticity evolve, rather than genes for a particular phenotypic characteristic, although selection acts upon the phenotype.

Every language having a structure, by the very nature of language, reflects in its own structure that of the world as assumed by those who evolved the language. In other words, we read unconsciously into the world the structure of the language we use. —Alfred Korzybski

He discovered its self-accumulating, self-reproducing nature and gave the spiral a motto (perhaps the only one associated with a geometric shape): Eadem mutato resurgo—Although changed, I arise again the same.

The day we stop learning is the day we die.

And once begun, change cannot be reversed.

Humans were never meant to be vegetarian," Hel bubbled, her face and fangs black with fluids.

El día en que dejamos de aprender es el día en que morimos.

They were the younger guys playing at the end of the Swing Era, just playing their version of it. It became known as bebop, which sounds esoteric, but it was really just an offshoot of swing music." That offshoot, however, almost instantly changed jazz music's identity, advancing it from a danceable idiom played with the audience's casual listening pleasure in mind to a more personal and cerebral modern music.

We know evolution happened because innumerable bits of data from myriad fields of science conjoin to paint a rich portrait of life's pilgrimage.

As Karl Marx once noted: ' Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.' William Jennings Bryan and the Scopes trial was a tragedy. The creationists and intelligent design theorists are a farce.

As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races. —Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 18711

Survival machines could evolve to be completely selfish and self-centered, but there is something that keeps their pure selfishness in check, and that is the fact that other survival machines are inclined "to hit back" if attacked, to retaliate if exploited, or to attempt to use or abuse other survival machines first.

Most conservatives today are more liberal than most liberals were in the 1950s.

Man is, in short, 'perfectible'—meaning continually improvable rather than capable of actually reaching absolute perfection.

By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, astronomy replaced astrology, chemistry succeeded alchemy, probability theory displaced luck and fortune, insurance attenuated anxiety, banks replaced mattresses as the repository of people's savings, city planning reduced the risks from fires, social hygiene and the germ theory dislodged disease, and the vagaries of life became considerably less vague.

Evolution does not just produce new species; it produces an increasing number of new species.