Quotes About Evolution

Jean-Léopold-Nicolas-Frédéric Cuvier

so Durrant stroked the area around his cloaca

Walter [Alvarez] dubbed the formation the "Crater of Doom." It became more widely known, after the nearest town, as the Chicxulub crater.

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. A tiny set of genetic variations divides us from the Neanderthals, but that has made all the difference.

Chicxulub crater.

The teeth had roots the length of a human hand, and each one weighed nearly ten pounds.

Beginnings, it's said, are apt to be shadowy. So it is with this story, which starts with the emergence of a new species maybe two hundred thousand years ago.

los neandertales siguieron el destino del Megatherium, el mastodonte americano, y de tantos otros desafortunados miembros de la megafauna. En otras palabras, tal como me lo expresó un investigador, «su mala suerte fuimos nosotros».

If there is danger in the human trajectory, it is not so much in the survival of our own species as in the fulfillment of the ultimate irony of organic evolution: that in the instant of achieving self-understanding through the mind of man, life has doomed its most beautiful creations. —E. O. WILSON

Beginnings, it's said, are apt to be shadowy. So it is with this story, which starts with the emergence of a new species maybe two hundred thousand years ago. The species does not yet have a name—nothing

No creature has ever altered life on the planet in this way before

As with any young species, this one's position is precarious.

all non-Africans, from the New Guineans to the French to the Han Chinese, carry somewhere between one and four percent Neanderthal DNA.

In Cuvier's day, the most prominent proponent of transformisme was his senior colleague at the Museum of Natural History, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. According to Lamarck, there was a force—the "power of life"—that pushed organisms to become increasingly complex.

This is the Mona Lisa of paleontology.

since the Antarctic palms of the Eocene, some fifty million years ago.

He called it a ptero-dactyle, meaning 'wing-fingered.

if there's been epidemic extinction and ecospace opens up, rats may be best placed to take advantage of that.

In one of the most often-quoted passages of On the Origin of Species, Darwin wrote: It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers. Natural

His interest, after all, was not in the origin of species but in their demise.

The modern humans "replaced" the archaic humans, which is a nice way of saying they drove them to extinction.

Somewhere in our DNA must lie the key mutation (or, more probably, mutations) that set us apart—the mutations that make us the sort of creature that could wipe out its nearest relative, then dig up its bones and reassemble its genome.

One of the many unintended consequences of the Anthropocene has been the pruning of our own family tree. Having cut down our sister species—the Neanderthals and the Denisovans—many generations ago, we're now working on our first and second cousins. By the time we're done, it's quite possible that there will be among the great apes not a single representative left, except, that is, for us.

having freed ourselves from the constraints of evolution, humans nevertheless remain dependent on the earth's biological and geochemical systems. By disrupting these systems—cutting down tropical rainforests, altering the composition of the atmosphere, acidifying the oceans—we're putting our own survival in danger.