Quotes About Evolution

if you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not.

It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator--our very self-consciousness--is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution.

Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me. This is easy to write, easy to read, and hard to believe... Are my values then so diametrically opposed to those that nature preserves? This is the key point.

Al hacerte perfecto, tu aspecto no es lo único que cambia —concluyó Tally. —No —convino David—. También lo hace tu pensamiento.

But somehow her satisfaction never lasted very long. She always found herself changing, pushing against the limits and ruining things for everyone around her. It's not always my fault, she said softly. Things just get complicated, sometimes.

The Rusties had more than one dream ..... After the first crude city killers were invented... they were redesigned to send people into space. Death and hope in one machine

But we lost so much in the Prettytime - all the foundations were gone. So we're stuck making it up as we go along! Tally laughed. So what else is new, Frizz? Life doesn't come with an instruction manual. So don't tell me that humanity being logic-missing is my fault.

You're still yourself on the inside, Shay. But when you're pretty, people pay more attention." "Not everyone thinks that way." "Are you sure about that? That you can beat evolution by being smart or interesting?

Time makes us pointless.

It's only after the change is fully formed that you can see what's happened.

Levade had told her one day that there was no such thing as a coherent human personality. When you are forty you have no cell in your body that you had at eighteen. It was the same, he said, with your character. Memory is the only thing that binds you to earlier selves; for the rest you become an entirely different being every decade or so, sloughing off the old persona, renewing and moving on. You are not who you were, he told her, nor who you will be.

One day, when you are grown up, you suddenly become aware that something has gone

Levade had told her one day that there was no such thing as a coherent personality. When you are forty you have no cell in your body that you had at eighteen. It was the same, he said, with your character. Memory is the only thing that binds you to earlier selves; for the rest, you become an entirely different being every decade or so, sloughing off the old persona, renewing and moving on. You are not who you were, he told her, nor who you will be.

I think perhaps the reincarnation is not of other men through me, but of myself at other times. I've been forced by circumstance into many separate lives.

Two of the behaviors that set early humans apart were the systematic sharing of food and altruistic group defense. Other primates did very little of either but, increasingly, hominids did, and those behaviors helped set them on an evolutionary path that produced the modern world.

The point of making children sleep alone, according to Western psychologists, is to make them "self-soothing," but that clearly runs contrary to our evolution. Humans are primates—we share 98 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees—and primates almost never leave infants unattended, because they would be extremely vulnerable to predators. Infants seem to know this instinctively, so being left alone in a dark room is terrifying to them.

It's revealing, then, to look at modern society through the prism of more than a million years of human cooperation and resource sharing. Subsistence-level hunters aren't necessarily more moral than other people; they just can't get away with selfish behavior because they live in small groups where almost everything is open to scrutiny.

What catastrophes seem to do—sometimes in the span of a few minutes—is turn back the clock on ten thousand years of social evolution. Self-interest gets subsumed into group interest because there is no survival outside group survival, and that creates a social bond that many people sorely miss.

Two of the behaviors that set early humans apart were the systematic sharing of food and altruistic group defense. Other primates did very little of either but, increasingly, hominids did, and those behaviors helped set them on an evolutionary path that produced the modern world. The earliest and most basic definition of community—of tribe—would be the group of people that you would both help feed and help defend.

Humans evolved in a world where nothing moved two thousand miles an hour, so there was no reason for the body to be able to counter that threat, but the brain still had to stay ahead of the game. Neurological processes in one of the most primitive parts of the brain, the amygdala, happen so fast that one could say they compete with bullets.

In effect, humans have dragged a body with a long hominid history into an overfed, malnourished, sedentary, sunlight-deficient, sleep-deprived, competitive, inequitable, and socially-isolating environment with dire consequences.

Most primates, including humans, are intensely social, and there are very few instances of lone primates surviving in the wild.

Both are profound acts of selflessness that distinguish us from all other mammals, including the higher primates that we are so closely related to.

A modern soldier returning from combat—or a survivor of Sarajevo—goes from the kind of close-knit group that humans evolved for, back into a society where most people work outside the home, children are educated by strangers, families are isolated from wider communities, and personal gain almost completely eclipses collective good.