Quotes About Evolution

The truth that no abrupt change has ever taken place in all the customs of a people, and that it cannot, in the nature of things, take place, is perhaps the most fundamental lesson that history teaches.

Anytime you're gonna grow, you're gonna lose something. You're losing what you're hanging onto to keep safe. You're losing habits that you're comfortable with, you're losing familiarity.

Tradition evolves with time and place while holding strongly to certain formal, cultural, and personal principles. Nostalgia seeks the security of past forms without the inherent principles.

I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.

Books don't repeat the same words over and over. The Gulliver's Travels whose whimsey amused you at twelve is not the Gulliver's Travels whose acid engaged you at thirty.

The things we never challenge are the things that never change

No son las especies más fuertes ni las más inteligentes las que sobreviven, sino las que saben dar una respuesta mejor al cambio. CHARLES DARWIN

If you're not growing anywhere, you're not going anywhere.

Excellent firms don't believe in excellence,' wrote Tom Peters in Thriving on Chaos, 'only in constant improvement and constant change.

Darwin had said the fittest survived, and the Social Darwinists completed the circle. The best way to demonstrate fitness to survive was to dominate one's fellows;

Concrete poets continue to turn out beautiful things, but to me they're more visual than oral, and they almost really belong on the wall rather than in a book. I haven't the least idea of where poetry is going.

I think that concrete poetry seems to have, as far as I can see, come to a kind of a dead end. It doesn't seem to be going any further than it went in its high period of about five or six years ago.

Then, of course, there are those sad occasions when a poet or a writer has not grown, and one has to let them go because they're just not making headway. But we have a very clear personal relationship with the authors.

A lot of people get impatient with the pace of change.

There aren't just bad people that commit genocide we are all capable of it. It's our evolutionary history.

I don't think we're yet evolved to the point where we're clever enough to handle a complex a situation as climate change. The inertia of humans is so huge that you can't really do anything meaningful.

There is little evidence that our individual intelligence has improved through recorded history.

If you start any large theory, such as quantum mechanics, plate tectonics, evolution, it takes about 40 years for mainstream science to come around. Gaia has been going for only 30 years or so.

We are the intelligent elite among animal life on earth and whatever our mistakes, [Earth] needs us. This may seem an odd statement after all that I have said about the way 20th century humans became almost a planetary disease organism. But it has taken [Earth] 2.5 billion years to evolve an animal that can think and communicate its thoughts. If we become extinct she has little chance of evolving another.

The most useless are those who never change through the years.

In framing a system which we wish to last for ages, we shd. not lose sight of the changes which ages will produce. [James Madison in the U.S. Constitutional Convention, June 26, 1787. The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, ed. Max Farrand (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), 1:422.]

You know for many elected officials they all started in the same place. You know marriage is between a man and a woman, but they understand that they are moving inevitably, catching up to the American public.

The arc of American history almost inevitably moves toward freedom. Whether it's Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, the expansion of women's rights or, now, gay rights, I think there is an almost-inevitable march toward greater civil liberties.

The process of adapting to the new conditions was slow and painful, but it need not have been. It was fifteen years or more before the studios began dimly to understand how best to operate in the new environment. Aging owners and production heads rigidly clung to the old methods of mass production in studio complexes with enormous overhead costs.