Quotes About Evolution

Yet I myself am a discontinuous being, not what I was meant to be, no longer what I was.

It seemed that digression was the true principle of the universe, that the only real subject was the way the subject kept changing.

Efendilerinizi deÄŸiÅŸtirmek için giysilerinizi deÄŸiÅŸtirin.

This is not what I had planned; but perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin. (Once

Sus piernas terminaban todavía en aquellas lamentables pezuñas, y los cuernos de su frente eran tan agudos como antes...».

The question of essences remains at the heart of the adaptive act; how to make a second version of a first thing, of a book or film or poem or vegetable, or of yourself, that is successfully its own new thing and yet carries with it the essence, the spirit, the soul of the first thing, the thing that you yourself, or your book or poem or film or your mango or lime, originally were.

Time passes. Big men dwindle, small men grow. This man shrinks into old age, those men's reach grows longer. They can stretch out their arms and touch places and people they couldn't reach before. There are companies here to lend assistance to companies there, to facilitate journeys, to execute strategies. Clowns become kings, old crowns lie in the gutter. Things change. It is the way of the world.

Cities change.

and do not speak to me, please, of African Eve or LUCA, the three-and-a-half-billion-year-old blob of goo that was our Last Universal Common Ancestor. I am aware of the family tree of the human race and of pre-Homo sap life on earth and to insist upon those genealogies now would be wilfully to miss my point.

If the old refused to die, the new could not be born.

120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer.

We will embarrass our descendants, just as our ancestors embarrass us. This is moral progress.

The point is that most of what we currently hold sacred is not sacred for any reason other than that it was thought sacred yesterday.

As many critics of religion have pointed out, the notion of a creator poses an immediate problem of an infinite regress. If God created the universe, what created God? To say that God, by definition, is uncreated simply begs the question. Any being capable of creating a complex world promises to be very complex himself. As the biologist Richard Dawkins has observed repeatedly, the only natural process we know of that could produce a being capable of designing things is evolution.

The doors leading out of scriptural literalism do not open from the inside. The moderation we see among nonfundamentalists is not some sign that faith itself has evolved; it is, rather, the product of the many hammer blows of modernity that have exposed certain tenets of faith to doubt.

What are the chances that we will one day discover that DNA has absolutely nothing to do with inheritance? They are effectively zero.

Religious moderation springs from the fact that even the least educated person among us simply knows more about certain matters than anyone did two thousand years ago.

We must continually remind ourselves that there is a difference between what is natural and what is actually good for us. Cancer is perfectly natural, and yet its eradication is a primary goal of modern medicine. Evolution may have selected for territorial violence, rape, and other patently unethical behaviors as strategies to propagate one's genes—but our collective well-being clearly depends on our opposing such natural tendencies.

Despite our perennial bad behavior, our moral progress seems to me unmistakable.

Over 99 percent of the species that ever walked, flew, or slithered upon this earth are now extinct. This fact alone appears to rule out intelligent design.

Robert Trivers argues, for instance, that people who can believe their own lies turn out to be the best liars of all—and an ability to deceive rivals has obvious advantages in the state of nature.

The sea squirt—a very simple marine creature—swims about during its juvenile phase looking for a place to settle, and once it settles and starts filter feeding, it digests its own brain, because it no longer has any need for perceptual or motor competence. This is often used as an unkind analogy for getting tenure in academia.

Clearly, one of the great tasks of civilization is to create cultural mechanisms that protect us from the moment-to-moment failures of our ethical intuitions.

Am I free to change my mind? Of course not. It can only change me.