Quotes About Evolution

Enjoy failure and learn from it. You can never learn from success.

Today, computers are almost second nature to most of us.

The idea I am trying to launch here is: the appearance of new species naturally and the appearance of new inventions by artifice are both responses to need.

it helpful to think that what evolves are the niches, and organisms negotiate for their occupancy.

Seeing is metamorphosis, not mechanism.

He used to pimp and pull shakedowns. Now he rode shotgun to History.

IBM had its origins in Jacquard's endeavours in Revolutionary France. And indeed IBM is, indeed, a direct descendant of the work that went on in Jacquard's workshop during the last years of the eighteenth century and the first years of the nineteenth.

Computer engineers of today are likely to find that if they have a two-week holiday they may miss a crucial new development in computing. Similarly, those wishing to keep abreast of mechanical engineering in the late nineteenth century had little choice but to keep working at the coalface where knowledge was being sledge-hammered out of the rock of ignorance.

There is an almost sensual longing for communion with others who have a larger vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendships between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality almost impossible to describe. PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN Why

Bowie himself said, "Even though I was very shy, I found I could get onstage if I had a new identity."2 After reviewing his troubled early years, British psychologist Oliver James wrote, "What seems to have been the trigger for his shift from distressed and tortured to emotionally healthy, was his adoption of personas in his musical career."3

The demise of Google Reader, if logical, is a reminder of how far we've come from the cuddly old 'I'm Feeling Lucky' Google days, in which there was a foreseeably-astonishing delight in the way Google's evolving design tricks anticipated what users would like.

It is the fate of all things to ripen, and then to decay.

You can't step into the same River even once, And why would you want to? You can't

If our bodies were different, though, our metaphors would be different, as Olaf Stapledon showed in Star Maker. Crabs walk sideways, for instance. If crabs could talk, they would undoubtedly describe progress in difficult negotiations as sidling toward agreement and express the hope for a better future by saying their best days are still beside them. Our bodies prime our metaphors, and our metaphors prime how we think and act.

Many thinkers have recognized for a long time now that if we do not eliminate war, war will eliminate us. Preventing violence, then, is simply the necessary prerequisite for the survival of our species. It is a project of evolutionary significance.

We often forget that the journey is just as important as the end destination, and evolution occurs all along the way.

Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.

Forgetting used to be a failing, a waste, a sign of senility. Now it takes effort. It may be as important as remembering.

Evolution itself embodies an ongoing exchange of information between organism and environment .... The gene has its cultural analog, too: the meme. In cultural evolution, a meme is a replicator and propagator — an idea, a fashion, a chain letter, or a conspiracy theory. On a bad day, a meme is a virus.

I've given up the looking glass; quicksilver has no sense of tact.

Strive to be better today than you were yesterday.

Science and technology multiple around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.

There was an age, however, when the transition from savagery to civilization, with all its impressive outward manifestations in art and architecture, took place for the first time.

In any case, in so far as our knowledge of the universe carries us, the advent of civilization for the first time on our globe represents the highest ascent of the life processes to which evolution had anywhere attained.