Quotes About Evolution

Other species don't suffer like people,' he said. 'Lizards don't start to drink earlier and earlier in the day. Hartebeests don't become dirty old hartebeests. Orang-outangs don't dread redundancy. Llamas don't go through the change of life. Elderly chameleons don't fear old age and tell their bored infants: "Natural camouflage isn't what it was when I was a lad.

Agencies add new services the way universities add new courses. Nothing wrong with that if you also discontinue services which have outlived their relevance. To keep your boat moving through the water, keep scraping the barnacles off its bottom. Seven

It follows that your advertising should consistently project the same image, year after year. This is difficult to achieve, because there are always forces at work to change the advertising

You sit in your chair and ignore it, Moldenke. You remain. Evolution continues, Moldenke remains. You remind me of pi, Moldenke -- ever constant. Do something! Sitting there, gassing the paper weeks away, caring not.

Moldenke would remain.

It would indeed be a tragedy if the history of the human race proved to be nothing more than the story of an ape playing with a box of matches on a petrol dump.

Times change, faces change but the doubt remains, the fear remains-

The scenery changes but the pain remains.

Too many of our preferences reflect nasty behaviours and states of mind that were genetically adaptive in the ancestral environment. Instead, wouldn't it be better if we rewrote our own corrupt code?

there is no need to pay homage to the product of selfish genes - as though self-replicating DNA from the old Darwinian era were some sort of secular equivalent to Providence.

There hadn't been a singular moment when she'd consciously decided to do all those things. From law school on, her course of righting wrongs and taking on injustices had evolved naturally. But, with age, she had come to understand the true motivation.

New vocabularies can make old beliefs possible.

You might not remember the days when doctors endorsed smoking cigarettes,

According to the latest research, we owe our tremendous brains to the need to think… and the need to run.

Fat—not carbohydrate—is the preferred fuel of human metabolism and has been for all of human evolution. We

We take it for granted that the sun rises in the east every morning and sets in the west at night. The next day, the sun does the same thing again. But what if I told you that the sun isn't moving at all? It's us who are spinning and moving around the sun! I trust you already knew that, but the takeaway from the analogy is that we tend to get mentally wedded to ideas that are no longer valid. After

hunter-gatherer ancestors consumed omega-6 and omega-3 fats in a ratio of roughly 1:1.

some experts believe our increased consumption of brain-healthy omega-3 fatty acids was responsible for the threefold increase in the size of the human brain). The

Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications." There's a nice word: ramifications. It's especially good in this context because, while the literal definition is "a structure formed of branches," from the Latin ramus, of course the looser definition is "implications." Darwin's tree certainly had implications.

The fossil record shows that no other species of large-bodied beast—above the size of an ant, say, or of an Antarctic krill—has ever achieved anything like such abundance as the abundance of humans on Earth right now.

The result will be gradual transmutation of heritable forms, and adaptation to circumstances, by a process of selective culling. Eventually he gave the crank a name: natural selection. Twenty years passed after the E notebook entry. The world heard nothing about natural selection.

This elaborate concatenation of life-forms and sequential strategies is highly adaptive and, so far as mosquitoes and hosts are concerned, difficult to resist. It shows evolution's power, over great lengths of time, to produce structures, tactics, and transformations of majestic intricacy. Alternatively, anyone who favors Intelligent Design in lieu of evolution might pause to wonder why God devoted so much of His intelligence to designing malarial parasites.

Every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a pre-existing closely allied species. Description or law, it challenged the theory of special creation and bruited the idea of evolution in a tone of thunderous innuendo.

Once a species of insect or bird has reached a new island and established a population, evolution toward gigantism does offer certain advantages: fat storage, thermal stability, and defense against predators, if there are any. But gigantism is also a way of becoming flightless, and flightlessness is a way of becoming marooned.