Quotes About Evolution

it is this very practice of acceptance that allows another to change if he chooses to do so.

An apology might help, but you can change your life without one.

Entelechy is the vital force that guides what we, and all life forms, are growing into.

Don't live the same year 75 times and call it a life.

Change is hardest at the beginning, messiest in the middle and best at the end.

The exchange between plants and people has shaped the evolutionary history of both. Farms, orchards, and vineyards are stocked with species we have domesticated. Our appetite for their fruits leads us to till, prune, irrigate, fertilize, and weed on their behalf. Perhaps they have domesticated us. Wild plants have changed to stand in well-behaved rows and wild humans have changed to settle alongside the fields and care for the plants—a kind of mutual taming.

Transformation is not accomplished by tentative wading at the edge.

Wild plants have changed to stand in well-behaved rows and wild humans have changed to settle alongside the fields and care for the plants—a kind of mutual taming.

All amphibians are tethered to the pond by their evolutionary history, the most primitive vertebrates to make the transition from the aquatic life of their ancestors to life on land.

Paula Gunn Allen, in her book Grandmothers of the Light, writes of the changing roles of women as they spiral through the phases of life, like the changing face of the moon.

The landscape has changed, but the story remains.

G. Evelyn Hutchinson, a pioneering ecologist, spoke eloquently of the living world as "the ecological theater and the evolutionary play." This decaying log is a stage, and the scenes take place in the gaps, where the colonists act out their drama.

The genus Dicranum has undergone considerable adaptive radiation, that is, the evolution of many new species from a common ancestor

Adaptive radiation, whether in Darwin's finches or in Dicranum, creates new species that are well adapted for specific ecological niches.

One day, after I'm a daffodil, I will be able to photosynthesize. It's something to look forward to.

transformation is slow.

Mosses are the amphibians of the plant world. They

Perhaps the Skywoman story endures because we too are always falling. Our lives, both personal and collective, share her trajectory. Whether we jump or are pushed, or the edge of the known world just crumbles at our feet, we fall, spinning into someplace new and unexpected. Despite our fears of falling, the gifts of the world stand by to catch us.

If you look at a platypus, you think that God might get stoned, "OK, let's take a beaver and put on a duck's bill. It's a mammal, but it lays eggs. Hey Darwin, kiss my ass!"

If you don't keep pushing the limits, you wake up one day and you're the "center square to block."

Civilization is a transient sickness.

Never blame the man: his hard-pressed Ancestors formed him: the other anthropoid apes were safe In the great southern rain-forest and hardly changed In a million years: but the race of man was made By shock and agony… … a wound was made in the brain When life became too hard, and has never healed. It is there that they learned trembling religion and blood- sacrifice, It is there that they learned to butcher beasts and to slaughter men, And hate the world.

big! You're growing

I remember being twenty-one and thinking that my personality was a solid thing, that me was set in stone, that I would always feel what I felt and believe what I believed. But now I know that me is fluid and shape-changing.