Quotes About Evolution

in hand with the progress of the human mind.… We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

So much of music builds on prior ideas and themes

history is a living thing that never dies.

the problem with Google is that it is forever evolving – adjusting its algorithm in ways it keeps secret.

Psychiatric diagnoses are getting closer and closer to the boundary of normal," said Allen Frances.

As our larynxes descended, we were able to make sounds with our mouths in new and far more expressive ways. Verbal language soon overtook physical gesturing as the primary means of communication for all human beings except Italians. (Earth (The Book), p. 36)

The gods would be moving on, in other words; and I, a mere mortal, would be left behind, forgotten

You're right, Margaret, absolutely right. Things have changed a lot, even since I've been here. It's a different place now. Better in some ways, worse in others. Better! she echoed, scornfully.

According to de Gaulle's account, Blum assured him of his interest in the soldier's ideas. 'But you fought against them,' his visitor observed. 'One changes one's point of view when one becomes head of the government,' came the reply.

For every reader who dies today, a viewer is born, and we seem to be witnessing . . . the final tipping balance.

Birds were like dinosaurs' better selves. They had short lives and long summers. We all should be so lucky as to leave behind such heirs.

What lived on-in me- was the discomfort of how completely I'd outgrown the novel I'd once been so happy to live in

Y se fue. Y ella se convirtió en mejor lectora.

The radical otherness of birds is integral to their beauty and their value. They are always among us but never of us. They're the other world-dominating animals that evolution has produced, and their indifference to us ought to serve as a chastening reminder that we're not the measure of all things.

You wouldn't believe how quickly the most interesting person in the world can turn into the most boring person you'll ever meet.

Once upon a time, it had sufficed to write 'The Sound and the Fury' or 'The Sun Also Rises.' But now bigness was essential. Thickness, length.

Katz had read extensively in popular sociobiology, and his understanding of the depressive personality type and its seemingly perverse persistence in the human gene pool was that depression was a successful adaptation to ceaseless pain and hardship.

To herself, she was no longer the person who'd left him waiting forever in her bedroom and then rained abuse on him, but he had no way of knowing this, because, of course, she was also still that person.

The very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship

You wake up one day and realize you are a different person. That seems to be how life happens, how it establishes its patterns. The adult becomes a stranger to the boy he used to be. You become distant from everybody, especially yourself, even if, in the secrecy of your heart, you feel mostly unchanged.

Dylan never met anyone who wasn't about to change immediately into someone else. His was a special talent for encountering persons about to shed one identity or disguise for another.

You can't reclaim a thing that changes as you touch it.

Call it the Darwinian contradiction. We come down from the trees and walk upright and what do we get for it? Foot pain! Bad backs! We cease living sexual lives regulated by mating seasons, by hormonal tides or the rotation of the earth and what happens? Marital misery. Divorce. Rape.

Since the world has changed so much, the same values don't lead to the same choices anymore.