Quotes About Evolution

Well, SMI2LE is Leary's slogan for space migration, plus intelligence increase, plus life extension. It's an interesting formula because, if you want to look at it this way, we all live in a triangle of space, time and consciousness. How much space can we travel through? How much time do we have? And how conscious are we of what's going on? The whole direction of evolution seems to be to produce beings that have much more space, more time and more consciousness.

And any domesticated primate alpha male, however cruel or crooked, can rally the primate tribe behind him by howling that a rival alpha male is about to lead his gang in an attack on this habitat. These two mammalian reflexes are known, respectively, as Religion and Patriotism. They work for domesticated primates, as for the wild primates, because they are Evolutionary Relative Successes. (So far.)

Most of the world was illiterate until the 1970s. ~•~

Man is ignorant of the nature of his own being and powers. Even his idea of his limitations is based on experience of the past. There is therefore no reason to assign theoretical limits to what he may be, or what he may do. — Aleister Crowley, Magick

It appears that some domesticated primates, over the aeons, have not precisely evolved but have learned how to criticize and examine their own neurological programs. Members of this group cannot be mechanically predicted. They exhibit, at times at least, what looks like growth or creativity, although it is possible for Fundamentalist Materialists to insist that this "is really random behavior or behavior whose determinants had not yet been understood.

The "soul" or Circuit VII is constant, because it is, as the Chinese say, void or no-form. It plays all the roles you play — oral dependent, emotional tyrant, cool rationalist, romantic seducer, neurosomatic healer, neurogenetic Evolutionary Visionary — but it is none of them. It is plastic. It is no-form, because it is all forms. It is the "creative Void" of the Taoists.

And once you have built that bigger, funnier, happier universe of thought, build a bigger and better one, for next month.

You can live in the reality-tunnel imprinted upon you by environmental accident or you can choose your own. You can go through brain changes as radically bad as those of Patty Hearst and Rusty Calley, as transcendentally beautiful as those of Buddha and Jesus, as epistemologically revolutionary as those of Darwin and Einstein.

There are a lot of different realities going around these days," Abbie Hoffman once said. Evolutionary acceleration is forcing us to the point where each will have to take responsibility for which reality we accept.

What is not-tuned-in by the best scientific instruments of 1986 may easily be tuned-in in 1987, for all we know.

This book dates from 1972-73, and the man who wrote it does not exist anymore. Even I, occupying the same body that he did, hardly remember him and quite often do not agree with his opinions at all, at all. I have therefore corrected and updated his ideas in about a hundred places because, frankly, he embarrasses me at times, especially since we share the same name as well as the same body.

The first and second circuits are Evolutionary Stable Strategies. They have worked, in more or less the same form, not just for primates but for other mammals, and for many other species, over vast aeons of time. The third, semantic circuit is an Evolutionary Unstable Strategy. It could very accurately be called revolutionary rather than evolutionary.

Mammalian sociobiology, rooted in the antique neural circuits of the old brain, contains many factors opposing the evolution of domesticated primates into true freedom and objective intelligence.

Loss is the price we pay for progress," she said. "Only as we leave things behind do we move forward.

last I looked appeared to be turning the place into a Marin County whorehouse.

It was that juxtaposition of how it used to be with how it had turned out that made L.A. so interesting and so sad a place, I thought.

Why stay we on earth except to grow?

Mahan held that a nation must expand or decline—for it was impossible for a nation to hold its own while standing still.

As the Arab proverb says, "People resemble their times more than they resemble their fathers.

So many transformations!

A better age would have to follow.

you must seek to become more than what you are by exposing yourself to different lands

For dear me, why abandon a belief Merely because it ceases to be true

Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.