Quotes About Evolution

The world steadily grows better because the human mind, applying itself to environment, makes it better... with hands... with tools... with horse sense and science and engineering.

we are even developing an exact ethic for extra-human relations.

But does Man have any "right" to spread through the universe? Man is what he is, a wild animal with the will to survive, and (so far) the ability, against all competition. Unless one accepts that, anything one says about morals, war, politics—you name it—is nonsense. Correct morals arise from knowing what Man is—not what do-gooders

It [now] seems to me that every time we manage to establish one freedom, they take another one away. Maybe two. And that seems to me characteristic of a society as it gets older, and more crowded, and higher taxes, and more laws.

something we had before we came down out of trees, and failed to shuck when we stood up. Because not one of those people said: "Please pass this so that I won't be able to do something I know I should stop.

Often, when new growth occurs, the most dreadful things seem to happen, but then we see that they were exactly what was required.

When a marriage begins the partners are like two discrete circles overlapping a little. The division between the two is great and each has specific tasks. As the marriage partners grow older, each learns a bit of the other's genius, and finally the two circles overlap more and more.

We haven't evolved much further in our own century. Our religion is romance: We locate the divine world in physical people—the people with whom we fall in love.

the urge toward suicide signals an edge of a new level of consciousness. If you can kill the right thing—the old way of adaptation—and not injure yourself, a new energy-filled era will begin.

When it is time for growth, the old ways and the old habits must welcome the new. The old way seems to hinder the new growth at every point, but if you persevere, this way will bring a new consciousness to birth.

A chicken is the egg's way of making more eggs.

I've learned a hell of a lot from [William S.] Burroughs. I think the best things in my books probably are inspired by Burroughs. I think about what Burroughs wrote and then I try to go one step further. And I may go one step back; I don't know.

How to evolve? Read my book Prometheus Rising, and do all the exercises in that. There are a lot of exercises. It will keep you busy for at least a year. And if at the end of that year you haven't evolved, write me a letter of complaint, and I'll try to write a better book.

Many a novel or play written in 1930, which seemed brutally realistic then, now seems a little quaint and unreal in places, because we no longer live in the semantic environment of 60 years ago. Joyce's Ulysses escaped this trap by not having a point of view at all, at all — his multiple narrator technique gives multiple points of view — just as post-Copenhagen physicists escape it by what they call model agnosticism, not accepting any one model as equal to the whole universe.

The human increment accelerates faster than pre-human evolution because through the third, semantic circuit and its symbols (words, maps, equations etc.) we are able to pass information (negative entropy: coherence) from generation to generation.

What is man? A bridge between the ape and the Superman — a bridge over an abyss. — F.W. Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

The Third Wave can, and will, transcend this problem within industrialism. The Third Wave will be neither capitalist nor socialist, nor some milkwater blend of the two. It will demand a whole new economy, just as feudalism created an economy unknown to tribal humanity and industrialism created the two competing economies of capitalism and socialism, both unguessed and unpredictable from the perspective of the feudal stage.

The New Fundamentalists are not as far separated from the Old Fundamentalists as they like to think they are.

The universe is so constructed as to be able to see itself," Spencer Brown once noted. The emergence of the neurosomatic, neurogenetic and metaprogramming circuits is the universe's way of "seeing itself" ever more clearly and totally, to decide where it is going.

Worse yet, scientific models, like people and cattle and insect species and mountains and all things known, have a lifespan. Mountains may survive geological eras, but scientific maps, like people and birds, have short lives. None has ever lasted more than a few hundred years, at present. To believe in any such mask with the fervor of Gross and Levitt contradicts all known facts of scientific history. Every theory they worship will someday get junked.

4) Prigogine's math indicates that the odds actually favor the optimists, since dissipative structures are more likely to evolve into more information-rich (intelligent?) forms than into more primitive or chaotic forms.

The entire nervous system, including the brain, has been designed like the rest of the body, by the "code" within the DNA molecule, which sends signals via messenger RNA molecules to tell the organism what to do: Grow red hair. Have blue eyes. Stand up and walk now. Start to talk. Find a mate. Etc. Our entire mental lives — our brain hardware and software — exist within the perimeters of this DNA master-tape.

Few of our ancestors were perfect ladies or gentlemen; the majority of them were not even mammals.

Any multi-cellular organism must, if it is to survive, contain a hard-wired bio-survival circuit, which very simply programs an either-or choice: GO FORWARD to the nourishing, the protective, or GO BACK, away from the threatening, the predatory.