Quotes About Evolution

The fossil bird Archaeopteryx is late Jurassic in age (146 million years old) so a thread of descent must connect the tinamou

It's strange how the simple things in life go on while we become more difficult.

People think about life in terms of changes, not levels.

As clouds race towards their own release from form, they are replenshied by the mutable process which created them. They drift, not into continuity, but into other, temporary states of being, all of which eventually decompose to melt into the surrounding air. They rise and fall like vaporous civilizations....

Just as there are odors that dogs can smell and we cannot, as well as sounds that dogs can hear and we cannot, so too there are wavelengths of light we cannot see and flavors we cannot taste. Why then, given our brains wired the way they are, does the remark "Perhaps there are thoughts we cannot think," surprise you? Evolution, so far, may possibly have blocked us from being able to think in some directions; there could be unthinkable thoughts.

It's really interesting with art-movies too, but art especially - to see how your attitude toward artists and works and your level of appreciation of them is always shifting and changing over the years.

One of the most important elements in the evolution of human institutions is the emergence of the difficult customer within the system itself, the radical who starts to question its very being, the reformer who calls for changes in the way it runs.

We will go on producing myths, ways of explaining ourselves to ourselves but, like everything else about us, they are in constant transition and we must not fundamentalise any of them.

For him the word 'horror' had become obsolete.

Miniture protoplasm, the dirty little bastard!

There were still many things to learn, but not so many as before.

he'd thought the past was dead. How long did it take for a past to die? She

There's nothing wrong with civilization. We're just no there yet.

And that is to say, of course, that you can read a culture without its literature, without the bother of gathering and holding its ideas, considering their genesis and evolution, and weighing them in the balance with each other.

Humans carry around legacy behaviors and biases, jerry-rigged holdovers from earlier stages of evolution that follow their own obsolete rules. What seem like erratic, irrational choices are, in fact, strategies created long ago for solving other kinds of problems. We're all trapped in the bodies of sly, social-climbing opportunists shaped to survive the savanna by policing each other.

Human history was the story of increasingly disoriented hunger.

Wilderness is gone. Forest has succumbed to chemically sustained silviculture. Four billion years of evolution, and that's where the matter will end. Politically, practically, emotionally, intellectually: Humans are all that count, the final word. You cannot shut down human hunger. You cannot even slow it. Just holding steady costs more than the race can afford.

Berries may compete to be eaten more than animals compete for the berries.

The web: yet another total disorientation that becomes status quo without anyone realizing it.

Still, history is the long process of outsourcing human ability in order to leverage more of it.

Like evolution, it reuses all the old, successful parts of everything that has come before. Like evolution, it just means unfolding.

When removed from their kind, individual human beings can change in remarkable ways .

Yes! And what do all good stories do?" There are no takers. Neelay holds up his arms and extends his palms in the oddest gesture. In another moment, leaves will grow from his fingers. Birds will come and nest in them. "They kill you a little. They turn you into something you weren't.

memory is always a collaboration in progress.