Quotes About Evolution

The golden age is before us, not behind us.

O Hamlet! what a falling-off was there.

What you doStill betters what is done.

I don't know how I got to this point but it must be as a result of everything that has come before so if I were to change something, I might not be at this point now.

It is a curious fact that men who know nothing of each other tend to work in the same direction at the same time. Darwin and Wallace, Mendel and de Vries.

Your job is to find out what the world is trying to be.

Sometime before the year 2025, America will pass through a great gate in history, commensurate with the American Revolution, Civil War, and twin emergencies of the Great Depression and World War II.

By the 2020s, America could become a society that is good, by today's standards, and also one that works.

People who have myopia genes and live in modern environments usually develop nearsightedness; people who have myopia genes but live as hunter-gatherers almost never do. So even effects that are largely genetic can at the same time be largely environmental.

It's easy to imagine a world in which genes have control over our minds, and for many animals they do. But once we took the evolutionary pathway toward greater intelligence and a lifestyle that relies on learning rather than inborn knowledge, our genes had no choice but to relinquish much of their control.

Of all the preferences that evolution gave us, I suspect the desire to share the contents of our minds played the single most important role in elevating us to the top of the food chain.* We are the fiercest predator on the planet by virtue of the power of our minds, but even human minds aren't that special on their own.

It was our capacity to learn from the experiences of others that gave Homo sapiens an enormous local advantage, with new strategies and innovations built on a platform of prior discoveries. As a consequence, each generation had no need to reinvent the wheel, and a child could acquire an understanding of the world that a few generations back would have been available only to geniuses.

every failure is a step to success!

Men prefer to believe that they are degenerated angels, rather than elevated apes.

A power is passing from the earth.

It's good to change. If the change brings about confusion, who cares? Confusion makes you think. And that's another good thing.

Half a life ago I was one man, and am now another. Where once I paid attention to my head, I now follow my heart. Where I once I strove for achievement, I now seek to give and receive love. Though I still want to earn a living, my writing now is entirely born in love and offered as love. I

All this was too much for Andrew Lang (1844–1912), a folklorist and disciple of E. B. Tylor, the best-known advocate of the evolution of religion. (We shall focus more on both Lang and Tylor later.) There are two aspects to Lang's reaction to Müller: the weakness of the philological method and the claim that an evolutionary theory can give a better explanation of the content of mythology than philology.

Yet he argued that even a tedious topic can take on a certain fascination if you make an effort to look at it afresh: "The subject must be made to show new aspects of itself; to prompt new questions; in a word, to change. From an unchanging subject the attention inevitably wanders away.

this observation leads Rozin to a stunning conclusion: "Disgust is the basic emotion of civilization.

You've got to grow up sometime.

There is nothing wrong with change, if it is in the right direction

To improve is to change; to be perfect is to have changed often.

change. Ideas change.