Quotes About Evolution

it's easy for even Nick to believe that green has a plan that will make the age of mammals seem like a minor detour.

In a few short seasons, simply by placing billions of pages of data side by side, the next new species will learn to translate between any human language and the language of green things.

Noisy aspens and remnant birches, forests of cottonwoods and poplars, take up the chorus: The world is turning into a new thing.

Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe in the future he shall be.

1. Human history was the story of increasingly disoriented hunger.

But even now, after an immense journey in separate directions, that tree and you still share a quarter of your genes.

Whatever damage Mark Schluter suffered, his thumbs and their wiring were still intact. Recent studies by a colleague of Weber's suggested that enormous areas of the motor cortex of game-cartridge children were devoted to thumbs, and that many in the emerging species Homo ludens now favored their thumbs over their index fingers. The game controller had at last consummated one of the three great leaps of primate evolution.

If only people, like some invertebrates, would just turn raging purple when they felt attraction. It would make the entire species so much less neurotic.

Musical taste changes so little. The sound of late childhood plays at our funerals.

A good answer is worth reinventing from scratch, again and again.

Somewhere in that last sixty minutes, high up in the phylogenetic canopy, life grows aware. Creatures start to speculate. Animals start teaching their children about the past and the future. Animals learn to hold rituals. Anatomically modern man shows up four seconds before midnight. The first cave paintings appear three seconds later. And in a thousandth of a click of the second hand, life solves the mystery of DNA and starts to map the tree of life itself.

Every belief will be outgrown, in time.

A virus can be useful to a species by thinning it out

A virus does not "want" to kill its host. That is not in the best interest of the virus, because then the virus may also die, unless it can jump fast enough out of the dying host into a new host.

Foodways like any other aspect of culture, are never static. Even without the influence of other cultures, we would be eating and cooking differently from the generations that came before us.

People want to think of a food tradition as something that would continue unchanging and timeless, unless some outside force knocked things askew.

How old does a recipe have to be in order to be traditional? What should we think when an old industrial food like salted (corned) beef or pickled herring becomes a part of "traditional" ethnic cuisine?

But the death machine had only sampled a vast new source of raw material: the civilians behind the lines. It had not yet evolved equipment efficient to process them, only big guns and clumsy biplane bombers. It had not yet evolved the necessary rationale that old people and women and children are combatants equally with armed and uniformed young men. That is why, despite its sickening squalor and brutality, the Great War looks so innocent to modern eyes.

Science grew out of the craft tradition

Britain, despite its roads, began shifting to wheeled transport early in the seventeenth century.

In the next hundred years, wooden wagonways diffused across England.

the ordeal of developing new selves will not be seriously entertained, much less embarked upon, until [people] are forced into it by the partial destruction of their former selves.

The Stanley Steamer was the best-selling car in America in 1898. Two years later, notes the historian Rudi Volti, "of the 4,192 cars produced in the United States in 1900, 1,681 were steamers, 1,575 were electrics, and only 936 used internal combustion engines.

The internal combustion engine evolved from the steam engine. Both use hot gases expanding within an enclosed cylinder to supply power. The gas in a steam engine is steam, generated externally by heating water in a boiler and introduced through a valve into the cylinder, where it expands and pushes on a piston connected to a rod that transfers the motion outside the engine to turn a pair of wheels.