Quotes About Evolution

twenty million years.

and were making themselves into many things they have never been before: augmented, multi-sexed, and most importantly, very long lived, the oldest at that point being around two hundred years old. But not one whit wiser, or even more intelligent. Sad but true: individual intelligence probably peaked in the Upper Paleolithic, and we have been self-domesticated creatures ever since.

I believe the twenty-first century can become the most important century of human history. I think a new reality is emerging. Whether this view is realistic or not, there is no harm in making an effort." —The Dalai Lama

Max Planck once said that a new paradigm takes over not when it convinces its opponents, but when its opponents eventually die.

And so: change. The inexorable emergence of difference in time. Becoming. One of the fundamental mysteries. Charlie hated it. He liked being; he hated becoming.

We were on our own; and so we became fundamentally different beings.

Indeed, if ever you are asked to choose between fixists and mobilists, as the two sides were called during the plate-tectonics controversy—or between the stabilists and the dynamicists in the current Sirius debate—always choose the dynamicists. History is on your side.

Survival of the fittest, which Sax had always considered a useless tautology. But if social Darwinists were taking over, then maybe the concept gained importance, as a religious dogma of the ruling order....

But that was back in the twentieth century, in the dark ages

History directing evolution.

There are going to be some guaranteed catastrophes bearing down on you that you aren't going to be able to avoid (i.e. death), so evolution has kindly given you a strategically located mental blind spot, an inability to imagine future disasters in any way you can really believe, so that you can continue to function, as pointless as that may be...Useful. Except when disastrously bad.

Praxis locals spoke French to him, and he could barely understand them. He had to listen hard, hoping his native tongue would come back to him, that the franglaisation and frarabisation he had heard about had not changed things too much; it was shocking to fumble in his native tongue, shocking too that the French Academy had not done its job and kept the language frozen in the seventeenth century like it was supposed to.

With practice one could dodge the past almost entirely.

And besides we were like wolves! We turned wolves into dogs and they turned us into humans— we were something like orangutans before, solitaries who didn't know how to work together, it was the wolves who taught us that, who taught us the idea of friendship and cooperation

Each reality is followed by one stranger than the last.

Abstract, conclusion; abstract, conclusion. Female brown capuchin monkeys throw things if they see other monkeys getting more than they got from an equivalent exchange. Aversion to inequity therefore probably very deep-rooted, evolutionarily. Sense of fairness evolved. Thus cooperative groups, long before hominids. Monkey ethics; interesting.

no extinctions from this point onward are inevitable (this has always been true, however) 19,340

I died as mineral and became a plant, I died as plant and rose to animal. I died as animal and I was human. Why should I fear? When was I less by dying? Yet once more I shall die human, To soar with angels blessed above. And when I sacrifice my angel soul I shall become what no mind ever conceived.

we're not here to, you know, reproduce Canada, for God's sake!

Perhaps periodization makes it easier to remember that no matter how massively entrenched the order of things seems in your time, there is no chance at all that they are going to be the same as they are now after a century has passed, or even ten years.

And with our work," John continued, "we are carving out a new social order and the next step in the human story"—i.e., the latest variant in primate dominance dynamics.

Senescence is not a simple matter. Staying alive when senescence should have kicked in—it's a wonder we've done as much as we have. There's probably a purpose in senescence. Avoiding overpopulation, perhaps. Making room for new genetic material.

Will I like it Jake? In your place? I hope so, hon. Is it very different? I smiled. People pay more for gasoline and have more buttons to push. Otherwise, it's about the same.

Those who professed themselves unable to believe in the reality of human progress ought to cheer themselves up, as the students under examination had conceivably been cheered up, by a short study of the Middle Ages. The hydrogen bomb, the South African Government, Chioang Kaidick, Senator McCarthy himself, would then seem a light price to pay for no longer being in the Middle Ages