Quotes About Evolution

The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skilful people in history. There

Socialism, which was very up to date a hundred years ago, failed to keep up with the new technology. [...] If Marx came back to life today, he would probably urge his few relating disciples to devote less time to reading Das Kapital and more time to studying the Internet and the human genome.

It is doubtful whether Homo sapiens will still be around a thousand years from now, so 2 million years is really out of our league.

Two particularly important nonhuman abilities that AI possesses are connectivity and updatability.

history does not tolerate a vacuum. If incidences of famine, plague and war are decreasing, something is bound to take their place on the human agenda. We

Women are generally more resistant to hunger, disease and fatigue than men.

The earth of a hundred millennia ago was walked by at least six different species of man. It's

Yet in the case of animals such as cattle, sheep and Sapiens, each with a complex world of sensations and emotions, we have to consider how evolutionary success translates into individual experience. In the following chapters we will see time and again how a dramatic increase in the collective power and ostensible success of our species went hand in hand with much individual suffering.

Una de las pocas leyes rigurosas de la historia es que los lujos tienden a convertirse en necesidades y a generar nuevas obligaciones.

Writing was born as the maidservant of human consciousness, but is increasingly becoming its master. Our computers have trouble understanding how Homo sapiens talks, feels and dreams. So we are teaching Homo sapiens to talk, feel and dream in the language of numbers, which can be understood by computers. And

The third way to change the laws of life is to engineer completely inorganic beings. The most obvious examples are computer programs and computer viruses that can undergo independent evolution.

any attempt to define the characteristics of modern society is akin to defining the color of a chameleon.

Your feelings are the voice of millions of ancestors, each of whom managed to survive and reproduce in an unforgiving environment. Your

Unfortunately, the evolutionary perspective is an incomplete measure of success. It judges everything by the criteria of survival and reproduction, with no regard for individual suffering and happiness.

When we adopt the proverbial bird's-eye view of history, which examines developments in terms of decades or centuries, it's hard to say whether history moves in the direction of unity or of diversity.

La domesticación de los animales se basaba en una serie de prácticas brutales que con el paso de los siglos se hicieron todavía más crueles.

Domesticated chickens and cattle may well be an evolutionary success story, but they are also among the most miserable creatures that ever lived.

The Cognitive Revolution is accordingly the point when history declared its independence from biology.

Organs evolve to perform a particular function, but once they exist, they can be adapted for other usages as well. Mouths, for example, appeared because the earliest multicellular organisms needed a way to take nutrients into their bodies. We still use our mouths for that purpose, but we also use them to kiss, speak and, if we are Rambo, to pull the pins out of hand grenades.

The average person in Jericho of 8500 BC lived a harder life than the average person in Jericho of 9500 BC or 13,000 BC. But nobody realised what was happening. Every generation continued to live like the previous generation, making only small improvements here and there in the way things were done. Paradoxically, a series of 'improvements', each of which was meant to make life easier, added up to a millstone around the necks of these farmers.

It takes a tribe to raise a human. Evolution thus favored those capable of forming strong social ties.

Cuanto más hemos trabajado para construir algo, más difícil es abandonarlo y hacer sitio a algo nuevo.

When agriculture and industry came along people could increasingly rely on the skills of others for survival, and new 'niches for imbeciles' were opened up.

Perhaps 65 million years from now, intelligent rats will look back gratefully on the decimation wrought by humankind, just as we today can thank that dinosaur-busting asteroid.