Quotes About Evolution

Long live the New Flesh!

Since I see technology as being an extension of the human body, it's inevitable that it should come home to roost.

Or was it a more sinister thing? Was the iPhone a malevolent protean organism, the stem-cell phone, mocking him who had cameras with real physical shutters whose sound you couldn't turn off? Promising to replace every other device on earth with its shape-shifting self—garage door openers, solar timers, television remotes, car keys, guitar tuners, GPS modules, light meters, spirit levels, you name it?

Was the iPhone a malevolent protean organism, the stem-cell phone, mocking him who had cameras with real physical shutters whose sound you couldn't turn off? Promising to replace every other device on earth with its shape-shifting self – garage door openers, solar timers, television remotes, car keys, guitar tuners, GPS modules, light meters, spirit levels, you name it?

The only languages which do not change are dead ones.

Imagine, I said, what could happen if English continues to grow as it has. Maybe one day it will be the only language left to learn. If that happens, I concluded, it will be the greatest intellectual disaster that the planet has ever known.

This is a lesson everyone who studies language eventually learns. You cannot stop language change. You may not like it ; you may regret the arrival of new forms and the passing of old ones but there is not the slightest thing you can do about it. Language change is as natural as breathing. It is one of the linguistic facts of life.

Old attitudes die hard, of course, and there will still be those who mourn the passing of the days when a single accent ruled the British airwaves. But they are a steadily shrinking minority.

You must first consider that a human life is an ongoing process that involves a constantly changing physical body as well as an enormous number of rapidly changing thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Your life therefore is an evolving experience, a continual flow. You are not a thing; that's why any label is constricting, highly inaccurate, and global.

The whole [scientific] process resembles biological evolution. A problem is like an ecological niche, and a theory is like a gene or a species which is being tested for viability in that niche.

An optimistic civilization is open and not afraid to innovate, and is based on traditions of criticism.

Perhaps a more practical way of stressing the same truth would be to frame the growth of knowledge (all knowledge, not only scientific) as a continual transition from problems to better problems, rather than from problems to solutions or from theories to better theories. This

The most general way of stating the central assertion of the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution is that a population of replicators subject to variation (for instance by imperfect copying) will be taken over by those variants that are better than their rivals at causing themselves to be replicated. This

a population of replicators subject to variation (for instance by imperfect copying) will be taken over by those variants that are better than their rivals at causing themselves to be replicated.

Thus, although the existence of progress in the biosphere is what the theory of evolution is there to explain, not all evolution constitutes progress, and no (genetic) evolution optimizes progress.

Unless a society is expecting its own future choices to be better than its present ones, it will strive to make its present policies and institutions as immutable as possible.

there is only one way of making progress: conjecture and criticism

As the ancient philosopher Heraclitus remarked, 'No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.

What was needed for the sustained, rapid growth of knowledge was a tradition of criticism. Before the Enlightenment, that was a very rare sort of tradition: usually the whole point of a tradition was to keep things the same.

The purpose of high-level sciences is to enable us to understand emergent phenomena, of which the most important are, as we shall see, life, thought and computation.

Quantum theory is, as I have said, one such theory. But the other three main strands of explanation through which we seek to understand the fabric of reality are all 'high level' from the point of view of quantum physics. They are the theory of evolution (primarily the evolution of living organisms), epistemology (the theory of knowledge) and the theory of computation (about computers and what they can and cannot, in principle, compute).

Changing our genes in order to improve our lives and to facilitate further improvements is no different in this regard from augmenting our skin with clothes or our eyes with telescopes.

They are 'universal constructors'.

Humanity is on the march, earth itself is left behind.