Quotes About Evolution

Everything that happened in the past It was all necessary to bring us to where we are.

She used to cry roughly three times a year. Now she seemed to cry three times before breakfast. Could that be considered progress?

We aren't in high school. We aren't really in our families and we aren't in our houses. Those are the places we grew up and the times we spent together, but they aren't us. If we think they are, then we're lost, because times end and places are lost. We aren't any place or any time . . . We are everywhere.

It was funny how the old practices always came around again. It was the rhythm of human enterprise to invent and worship some new approach, to fully reject it a generation later, to realize the need for it again a generation or two after that and then hastily reinvent it as new, usually without its original elegance. Scientists hated to look backward for anything.

But like everything else, love changed.

Those were the people who made her something, and without them she was different. She'd held on to them and to that old self tenaciously, though. She clung to it, celebrated it, worshipped it even, instead of constructing a new grown-up life for herself. For years she'd been eating the cold crumbs left over from a great feast, living on them as though they could last her forever.

I knew her hair and her coloring and her shapes would be different next time, but the way she wore her body would keep on.

I think the true ascent of man, the moment when humans divided irrevobably from apes and other fellow creatures, occurred with the birth of the first distinct soul. And much happiness ensued.

Once Paul told her that the beach was like him because it changed every day but it never made any progress. Later she remembered thinking that a normal person might have begun by saying that he was like the beach.

Once Paul told her that the beach was like him because it changed every day but never made progress

It was the rhythm of human enterprise to invent and worship some new approach, to fully reject it a generation later, to realize the need for it again a generation or two after that and then hastily reinvent it as new, usually without its original elegance.

but my soul was hardly situated before I moved along.

advocates unfettered scientific research and debate—but then, with no evidence, simply declares discussions about evolution and global warming closed; •

Is DNA destiny?

Over the next 400 million years, the cyanobacteria—taking in carbon dioxide and giving back oxygen—turned the sky from

I think of us humans as a family of amnesia victims who kept making up stories about our past until we found a means to reconstruct it—the sciences.

brachiosaurus weighed about 77 tons, which is about 154 thousand pounds.

When two people are having problems, it's hard to tell who has changed.

The paradox is that we can become wiser and more compassionate and live more fulfilling lives by refusing to be who we have tended to be in the past. But we also must relax. Accept things as they are in the present, as we thrive to change ourselves.

Aesthetic experiences are still, more than likely, internal excitations of the brain, as we see from the fact that ingesting recreational drugs can bring on even more intense experiences of transcendence. And the particular triggers for natural aesthetic experiences are readily explicable from the evolutionary pressures that have shaped the perceptual systems of human beings

In 2005, a survey was conducted in thirty-four countries measuring the percentage of adults who accept evolution. The United States ranked thirty-third, just above Turkey. Meanwhile, high school students in the United States test below those of every European and Asian nation in their understanding of science and math. These data are unequivocal: we are building a civilization of ignorance.

Judging from the state of my consciousness at the time, millions of years of hominid evolution had produced nothing more transcendent than a craving for a cheeseburger and a chocolate milkshake.

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 thing you're doing by default is rarely the best possible version of the thing.