Quotes About Evolution

Interestingly enough, it is now known that play behaviour is not limited to birds and mammals. Monitor lizards, turtles, crocodiles and even fish and cephalopods have been reported to engage in behaviours that do not seem to serve any other purpose than simply having fun.27,28 If all these animals could play, we are certain that Mesozoic dinosaurs could, too.

There aren't many now who leave from the same world they were born into. Not here, not anywhere on earth as far as I can tell or know; the simplest and most unchanging of human societies have been shattered in the last hundred years, people flung into centrifuges of change and loss, that there comes to be nothing at last to say good-bye to. I was leaving the world, but it was not my world I was leaving

In the twilight of the world that we inhabit there will come to some on soft, silent wings a strange understanding: that things have not always been the way they are, and that therefore they need not always be as they have been. And Hegel says that this understanding is itself the sign that indeed the night is coming, that maybe the morning will be ours to see." Hegel

John Crowley

I've learned...that here you can never go back the way you came. That you never do anywhere. You only and always go on.

Suppose a branch of our old family tree—a branch that seemed doomed to wither—had in fact not died out but survived, survived by learning arts just as new to the world but utterly different from the tool-making and fire-building of its grosser cousins, us. Suppose that instead they had learned concealment, smallification, disappearance, and some way to blind the eyes of beholders.

It's like those high-school yearbook photos that everyone would rather not see: Oh my God, look at that mullet hair. I have those photos too, but for me, they're, like, entire movies. And they show them on cable.

Sometimes the essay is where we end up when everything that we know must change.

By the twentieth century, when the individual had replaced the family as the primary economic unit, the tie between sexuality and reproduction weakened further. Influenced by psychology as well as by the growing power of the media, both men and women began to adopt personal happiness as a primary goal of sexual relations. Various

Already we see a trend in our own technological societies towards the fabrication of smaller and smaller machines that consume less and less energy and produce almost no waste. Taken to its logical conclusion, we expect advanced life-forms to be as small as the laws of physics allow.

Our brains are the most complicated objects that we have so far encountered in the Universe. We are far from simple. Indeed, were our brains significantly simpler, we would be too simple to know it.

Today, a science fiction writer looking for a futuristic tale of silicon dominance would not pick upon the chemistry of silicon so much as the physics of silicon for his prognostications. But this form of silicon life could not have evolved spontaneously : it requires a carbon-based life-form to act as a catalyst. We are that catalyst.

by means of evolution by natural selection, which showed how living things can become well adapted to their environments over the course of time under a very wide range of circumstances, so long as the environment is not changing too quickly. Complexity could develop from simplicity without direct Divine intervention.

Those who object to what is new are controlled by the love of what is old.

I decided this early on at Justice: if the traditional way was the most effective way of doing something, then we'd maintain it. But if it was not functioning at optimum levels, we would be doing the country a disservice by continuing to do things "like we've always done them."

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind,

The human mind evolved always in the company of the human body, and of the animal body before it was human. The intricate connections of mind and body must exceed our imagination, as from our point of view we are peculiarly prevented from observing them.

Finally, consciousness itself may end or vanish in a humanity that has become completely etherealized, losing the close-knit organism, becoming masses of atoms in space communicating by radiation, and ultimately perhaps resolving itself entirely into light. That may be an end or a beginning, but from here it is out of sight.

Complete adaptation to environment means death. The essential point in all response is the desire to control environment.

The goal of education is to enable individuals to continue their education.

The conception that growth and progress are just approximations to a final unchanging goal is the last infirmity of the mind in its transition from a static to a dynamic understanding of life.

New inventions, new machines, new methods of transportation and intercourse are making over the whole scene of action year by year. It is an absolute impossibility to educate the child for any fixed station in life.

Not perfection as a final goal, but the ever-enduring process of perfecting, maturing, refining is the aim of living.

But the live creature adopts its past; it can make friends with even its stupidities, using them as warnings that increase present wariness. Instead of trying to live upon whatever may have been achieved in the past, it uses past successes to inform the present. Every living experience owes its richness to what Santayana well calls "hushed reverberations.