Quotes About Evolution

Despite what I said about staying the way we were, I changed. I, who have always believed in speaking my mind and made it my mission to uncover the truth, have found myself keeping secrets. Sometimes life is more complicated than the simple rules we make for it.

You've grown up, girl. You've grown up real nice, Welcome home

more smoothly than you have done this

But people were used to saying "Deerwander" now, without thinking about the name one way or another; they might still be saying "Deerwander" when the village became a city, where children lived who had never seen a deer drinking at a rain pool in a hollow of the granite.

It is not easy," he began, "for the snake to shed skin. The new skin underneath is extremely sensitive, tender to the slightest touch. The snake at this time has a tendency to heightened temperament. It is all in the natural order of things.

The whistle now resides at the Pratt Institute but used to blow the shift changes at Bethlehem Steel;

I don't exactly know who I thought I'd be by now, but I know I'm not that person.

Maybe we all change over time.

Nobody until very recently would have thought that their husband was supposed to be their best friend, confidante, intellectual soul mate, co-parent, inspiration.

A man is not a different person just because he becomes aware. Oh I know it must seem like metamorphosis when the eyes of a blind man are opened, but he's the same man. We grow, mercifully, and growth is just awareness of more and more.

Why shouldn't it last? We are living in the age of progress, William. Mankind is progressing." To which remark William had always replied with the irritating question, "What to?

Elizabeth Hand

That before-and-after-feel, as though this was going to be the end of one time and the beginning of another.

specifically instructed, moving from one model that

I want today to give up being so smugly sure about what tomorrow won't need.

Of the many species that have existed on earth--estimates run as high as fifty billion--more than ninety-nine per cent have disappeared. In the light of this, it is sometimes joked that all of life today amounts to little more than a rounding error. more than a rounding error.

The strongest argument for gene editing cane toads, house mice, and ship rats is also the simplest: what's the alternative? Rejecting such technologies as unnatural isn't going to bring nature back. The choice is not between what is and what was, but between what is and what will be, which, often enough, is nothing.

a single-continent world would be expected to contain only about a third as many mammalian species as currently exist.

Everything (and everyone) alive today is descended from an organism that somehow survived the impact. But it does not follow from this that they (or we) are any better adapted. In times of extreme stress, the whole concept of fitness, at least in a Darwinian sense, loses its meaning: how could a creature be adapted, either well or ill, for conditions it has never before encountered in its entire evolutionary history?

Only in a place where the rules of the game remain fixed is there time for butterflies to evolve to feed on the shit of birds that evolved to follow ants.

When all of these were considered together, a pattern emerged: mass extinctions seemed to take place at regular intervals of roughly twenty-six million years.

There is every reason to believe that if humans had not arrived on the scene, the Neanderthals would be there still, along with the wild horses and the woolly rhinos. With the capacity to represent the world in signs and symbols comes the capacity to change it, which, as it happens, is also the capacity to destroy it.

The choice is not between what is and what was, but between what is and what will be, which, often enough, is nothing.

One biographer summed up Lyell's influence on Darwin as follows: "Without Lyell there would have been no Darwin." Darwin himself, after publishing his account of the voyage of the Beagle and also a volume on coral reefs, wrote, "I always feel as if my books came half out of Lyell's brains.