Quotes About Evolution

Was this what a family was, how it grew—straight as the children's teeth? Sure, there was an arm in a sling and over time the grandparents disappeared from the photos. The occasions changed, as did the dogs. But this was a family, start to finish, without wars or famines or political prisons, without a stranger coming to town to drown your daughter.

For us, the story is more important than the person. If a man and his story are in conflict, it is the man who must change.

Developments can happen right in front of you like that, you don't even see them.

If we want to change the systems we are part of - our countries, communities, organizations, and families - we must also see and change ourselves

I'm inspired by history, different periods.

It's been a transformative period and I really wanted to make music from what I've experienced.

I'm very inspired by past music.

I love music videos, I really do. I think it's kind of sad that it's a dying art form.

And after night comes day, or more night, depending on the particular time-frame you choose to apply to your perspective.

Laws banning the importation and interstate transfer of slaves contributed to the evolution of proslavery doctrine by drawing a line between slave trading and slaveholding. That line originated as a useful fiction written by planters in the upper South during the revolutionary era.

Duplication and transfer from other genetic sources are examples of nature's ability to co-opt existing tools: evolution the tinkerer. Evolution also creates from scratch. We call these de novo mutations, and they arise when a seemingly nonsensical run of DNA mutates and changes into a readable sentence.

The seven billion of us alive today are, according to all the evidence available to us, the last remaining group of human great apes from a set of at least four that existed 50,000 years ago.

For our purposes, if we are to look at the evolution that led to where we are now, instead of the nice neat tree, I think it could reasonably be described as one big, million-year clusterfuck.

For the sake of perspective, life has existed on Earth for about 3.9 billion years. The species Homo sapiens, of which you are a member, emerged a mere 300,000 years ago, as far as we know, in pockets in the east and north of Africa. Writing began about 6,000 years ago, in Mesopotamia, somewhere in what we now call the Middle East.

But they also became us, and we will find them in the old bones and inside our own cells. We carry the past with us. There was no beginning, and there are no missing links, just the ebb and flow and ebb again of living through epochs. Those ancient people never went extinct—we just merged.

DNA also reveals behavior. Culture can become embedded in our cells just as it gets buried in the floors of caves, bogs, and dwellings.

There are no spaces in genes, but cells still understand the three-letter structure. De novo genes arise when a clump of letters is converted into a meaningful sentence by chance, and thus suddenly becomes understandable by the mechanics of the cell, and translated into a protein. The protein that results is utilised in some way. If it is used, then the organism that has acquired this new gene will pass it on.

By the time of the agricultural revolution, we see multiplication and expansion of genes that encode salivary amylase, an enzyme in your spittle that initiates the digestion of complex molecules. Some people have eighteen copies of it, but chimpanzees only have two.

All life is set for extinction over a long enough timescale; more than 97 percent of species that have ever existed are already gone.

Flight is a good trick, and has evolved repeatedly in distantly related creatures, but it has also evolved many times over within the same groups of creatures.

As for its original meaning in the evolution of us, I no longer know if it is true. As we have seen, in technology, in sex, in fashion, we are different from other animals. But the implication that the differences between us and them are determined by our relative position on a line is questionable.

Biologists sometimes get physics envy, because every time we find out one of our big rules – universal genetics, evolution by natural selection – things look more complex within them as soon as we begin to look.

Something on the order of 107 billion modern humans have existed, though this number depends on when exactly you start counting. All of them—of us—are close cousins, because our species has a single African origin.

from a time when there were at least four human species on Earth right up to the kings of Europe into the eighteenth century.