Quotes About Evolution

From aardvarks to zebras, most of our mammalian cousins have working copies of the genes that can manufacture vitamin C naturally within their bodies. But humans (along with guinea pigs, of all things) have a genetic inborn error in metabolism, a mutation that renders us incapable of doing the same thing. This makes us completely dependent upon our diets to get our daily supply of vitamin C.

Once you lose someone it is never exactly the same person who comes back.

He fell in love with her because I didn't suit him anymore - nor him, me, though I could not see it, but he saw it for me.

as if languagelessness was a step up, in evolution, from the chatter of consciousness.

Albert Einstein goes, "The problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.

Evolutionary biologists tell us we have a "negativity bias" that makes our brains remember negative events more strongly than positive ones. So when we're feeling lost or discouraged, it can be very hard to conjure up memories and feelings of happiness and ease.

And yes, water freezes. But it also melts.

Self-love is an unfolding process that gains strength over time, not a goal with a fixed end point.

As cultural politics change, museums change with them.

All knowledge is transient, linked to the world around it and subject to change as the world changes.

By the early 1800s, India had been reduced from a land of artisans, traders, warriors and merchants, functioning in thriving and complex commercial networks, into an agrarian society of peasants and moneylenders.

a highly developed country of the past, in an advanced state of decay).

Ugliness is halfway to beauty.

A computer needs words to stay the same over long periods of time. A computer can't deal with a word that means one thing one year, another the next, or that slides from innocence into stupidity as silly did.

In the new model the presidency bears little resemblance to the original conception of a national leader and chief executive; it owes even less to the later ideal of the president as "the tribune of the people.

Unlike scientific truths, which are cumulative and frequently superseded, archaisms are fixed, impervious to evidence. What is the doctrine of "the framers' original intent" and "constitutional originalism" but a variant of creationism and the denial of historical evolution

The privatization of public services and functions manifests the steady evolution of corporate power into a political form, into an integral, even dominant partner with the state. It marks the transformation of American politics and its political culture, from a system in which democratic practices and values were, if not defining, at least major contributory elements, to one where the remaining democratic elements of the state and its populist programs are being systematically dismantled.

For it would be only for a time. Until what he knew and thought became no longer relevant or necessary and was forgotten. But that was the same with all of us. We were only what we were for a time, at that time. Then our own silver began to mix with the tin of our future to change us. I knew this to be so and grieved for Windlow while I grieved for me. In time I would not be this Peter, even as I now was not the peter of two years ago.... Yet that Peter was not lost.

The ancient lizard mind lies below the mammalian mind, which lies below a primate mind, which is modified by a mind adapted to language, and since these layers have developed in response to differing evolutionary pressures, they often do not function efficiently together. Human civility tries to control ape dominance, human rationality tries to control mammalian sexuality, human social conscience tries to ameliorate reptilian greed, never with total success.

After our earliest ancestors crawled out of the oceans, how soon did they feel the desire to crawl back in?

There's always time to change your life.

Do you understand how one small dog—afraid of the wolves who had attacked him and those who would attack him anew—might stand on his hind legs, might evolve in a moment, so he could run away and never return?

When Indian women begin the search for an Indian man, they carry a huge list of qualifications. He has to have a job. He has to be kind, intelligent, and funny. He has to dance and sing. He should know how to iron his own clothes. Braids would be nice. But as the screwed-up Indian men stagger through their lives, Indian women are forced to amend their list of qualifications. Eventually, Indian men need only to have their own teeth to get snagged.

Son, things have never been like how you think they used to be.