Quotes About Evolution

We know that some early humans migrated into Asia and Europe within the last quarter of a million years, but their dominion outside of Africa was temporary, and they probably leave no descendants today. Around seventy thousand years ago another group of people drifted away from Africa, and the process of setting down new roots all over this planet began.

The mammals—hairy creatures that produce milk to nurture their young—are a small group of organisms on Earth, with only around 6,000 types known, one-fifth of which are different styles of bat.

A thousand years ago, we Europeans share all of our ancestry. Triple that time and we share all our ancestry with everyone on Earth.

We have good evidence that Homo erectus, that highly successful human who walked all over the Earth from 1.9 million years ago until around 140,000 years ago, was a fire user in some capacity. The dates when they first utilised fire remain disputed.

scientific research, one that underwrites every single aspect of the life sciences. "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution

We are the only animal that cooks.

No matter the languages we speak or the colour of our skin, we share ancestors who planted rice on the banks of the Yangtze, who first domesticated horses on the steppes of the Ukraine, who hunted giant sloths in the forests of North and South America, and who laboured to build the Great Pyramid of Khufu.

males and females can be made. In the second broad category of being a sexual organism are the species that have dozens of sexes, possibly thousands.

According to traditional paleoanthropology based on bones, by the time Homo sapiens reached Europe, probably around 60,000 years ago, the Neanderthals were already there and well established, albeit in small communities.

Adam Rutherford

The key finding was that the sequences of DNA generated implied that the human that led to us diverged from those who led to the Neanderthals around 500,000 years ago.

Not only were we diverse in our skin color long before the dispersal from Africa, we were diverse in our skin color before we were our own species.

DNA subtly changes over time via the genetic equivalents of typos—spelling mistakes which slip through due to inaccurate copyediting by the proteins that check the code after it has been replicated.

Every evolutionary pathway is unique, and while all living beings are related, how each one came to be is a different story, with different pressures driving selection, and random changes in DNA providing the template from which variation, selection and evolutionary change can occur. Evolution is blind, mutation is random, selection is not.

All abilities are evolved, which doesn't mean that they all have common roots.

Darwin, with typical prescience, suspected that this might be the case: Man alone is capable of progressive improvement. That he is capable of incomparably greater and more rapid improvement than is any other animal, admits of no dispute; and this is mainly due to his power of speaking and handing down his acquired knowledge.

Creationists (and others unencumbered by facts) cite epigenetics to assert that Darwin was wrong, and that these transgenerational epigenetic studies show Lamarckian evolution. They don't, as the changes are not perpetual and do not change the DNA sequence itself, on which natural selection acts. Even

A zebroid is a zebra with any other equine animal. A ligur is a male lion with a lady tiger. A mule is a jack donkey with a female horse. A hinny is a jenny with a male horse. And a grolar bear is a polar bear with a grizzly. Very rare but presumably utterly terrifying.

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. Whenever humans met - Sapiens, Neanderthal, Denisovans - they had sex. What a time to be alive.

The question of our relationship with Neanderthals has been refined with genetics, in terms of our shared ancestors; our lineage moved away from theirs around half a million years ago. But what DNA analysis revealed more categorically than anything else was that we had sex with them, repeatedly, probably as soon as these two peoples met, and every time afterward.

In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches … Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.' 'Chapter 14: Recapitulation and Conclusion' in The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, 1859

There's no trace of genetic fair skin between those two dates.

crunching. The amount of introgression from Neanderthals is proportionally lower on the modern X than on the rest of the chromosomes. X chromosomes are only passed on by males half of the time because we also have a Y, but all of the time by women, who have two Xs. The observation that there is less Neanderthal DNA on our Xs implies that the first encounters we had with them that resulted in procreation were male Neanderthals with female Homo sapiens.

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge . . . says Darwin in The Descent of Man, his study of the evolution of humans from our hairier ancestors.