Quotes About Evolution

emerged from dance-oriented early hip-hop (which, like jazz, evolved by extending the breaks for dancers), it's morphed into something else entirely: music that sounds best in cars. People do dance in their cars, or they try to.

Things fall apart, it's scientific.

As music becomes less of a thing--a cylinder, a cassette, a disc--and more ephemeral, perhaps we will begin to assign an increasing value to live performances again.

If "final causes" means purposes, or purposive activities, then Darwinism not only does not "expel" them: it builds them into the very foundation of its explanation of evolution. Even

ALTRUISM WAS, from the very start, a problem for the Darwinian theory of evolution, if not something worse than a problem. As a result, Darwinians have always been under a certain temptation to "cut the knot," and deny the very existence of altruism. This

sociobiologists are not merely willing, but devoted, "Slaves of the Gene."" They believe that an organism-a man, say-is epiphenomenal to his genes: an effect, not a cause. Or at least, they believe that a man is about as epiphenomenal to his genes, as his singlet (for example) is to him. Wilson spoke for all sociobiologists, when he said: "An organism is only DNA's way of making more DNA."24 Fourth:

Sociobiology, then, is a religion: one which has genes as its gods. Yet

Nor have any Darwinians ever given, to this day, any such reconciliation of their theory with the teleological language which they employ as freely as though they were disciples, not of Darwin, but of Paley. Presumably

Darwinians, then, have never paid, or even acknowledged, the debt they have all along owed the public: a reconciliation of their teleological explanations of particular adaptations with their non-teleological explanation of adaptation in general. And not only have they never paid this debt: they have in fact become progressively less conscious, with time, of the fact that they owe this debt. This

It has turned out, in fact, to be far harder to translate teleological into non-teleological language than had been anticipated by philosophers; or at any rate, by philosophers friendly towards Darwinism (as virtually all the writers in question are). Whether such translation is possible at all is more than anyone knows. As

I knew they were mine because they became so in tiny steps across my soul.

There is only so much space on any one person's hard drive, and old memories are prone to replacement by newer ones.

Hydrogen is a light, odorless gas which, given enough time, changes into people.

defines domestication as "the human creation of a new form of plant or animal—one that is identifiably different from its wild ancestors and extant wild relatives.

Maps of Time attempts to assemble a coherent and accessible account of origins, a modern creation myth.

Fernandez-Armesto, F. (2007). The world: A history. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall.

Brown, C. S. (2007). Big history: From the Big Bang to the present. New York: The New Press.

Between 1750 and 2000 the number of human beings increased from approximately 770 million to almost 6 billion, close to an eightfold increase in just 250 years. This increase is the equivalent of a growth rate of about 0.8 percent per annum and represents a doubling time of about eighty-five years. (Compare this with estimated doubling times of fourteen hundred years during the agrarian era and eight thousand to nine thousand years during the era of foragers.)

From the beginning most of history was a story of divergence: humans' biological and cultural differentiation as they evolved and dispersed across the planet. For the past millennium, history has been dominated by convergent forces, of which globalization is the latest phase. During this era that I call the Great Convergence, human interaction, trade, and intercommunication have increased at a rapid rate.

most of human history (chronologically speaking) has taken place in communities quite innocent of state power.

With modern research, almost every aspect of the old edifice of human evolution,] the explanations of the development of modern man, domestication, metallurgy, urbanization and civilization - may in perspective emerge as semantic snares and metaphysical mirages.

They came silently as ghosts themselves, swept along like leaves being scattered about them in the scurrying east wind. Yet their running forms seemed carved out by the wild landscape, in the natural facts of evolution, so they were almost perfectly camouflaged, shielded by the deepening colors of autumn change.

eBooks are just digital copies of analog books. Convenient, yes. But we have the technology now to rethink what a book is.

I see technology as being an extension of the human body.