Quotes About Evolution

Sono solo un dinosauro, come dici tu, e cerco di estinguermi senza troppa tristezza.

Curious how Love destroys every vestige of that politeness which the human race, in its years of evolution, has so painfully acquired.

However, couples have to think carefully about what it takes to build, deepen, and sustain commitments that are now almost completely voluntary. Modern marriages cannot just glide down the well-worn paths of the past.

Up until 1950 most families' discretionary income did not cover much more than an occasional meal away from home; a beer or two after work; a weekly trip to the movies, amusement park, or beach; and perhaps a yearly vacation, usually spent at the home of relatives. Few households had washing machines and dryers. Refrigerators had only tiny spaces for freezing ice and had to be defrosted at least once a week. Few houses had separate bedrooms for all the children.

When the prepared foods and drip-dry shirts that had eased the work of homemakers also made it possible for men to live comfortable, if sloppy, bachelor lives . . .

The idea that in prehistoric times a man would spend his life hunting only for the benefit of his own wife and children, who were dependent solely upon his hunting prowess for survival, is simply a projection of 1950s marital norms onto the past.

If you've ever tried to alter your own marital patterns you know that change doesn't happen overnight. In history, as in personal life, there are very few moments or events that mark a complete turning point. It takes a long time for ideas to filter through different social groups. Typically, individuals adopt only a few new behaviors at any one time, and old habits hang on long after most people have agreed they should be dropped.

European demographer Anton Kuijsten comments that rather than ordering from "the standard life course menu, as people used to do," an individual now "composes his or her history à la carte." And marriage, "the obligatory entrée" during the 1950s, "has become the optional dessert.

Couples in the Paleolithic world would never have fantasized about running off by themselves to their own little retreats in the forest. No Stone Age lovers would have imagined in their wildest dreams that they could or should be "everything" to each other. That way lay death.

There are many people who claim they can provide you with a road map. But in fact, on virtually every issue concerning marriage today, most personal advice gurus and policy makers lag behind the real changes transforming marriage.

At what point will elegant linguistic languor be permanently usurped by text-speak expediency? When will we humans abandon the ability to generate long, complex, lusciously worded emotional expressions—like Elizabethan sonnets!

For me, Buddhism is like a living organism. If it is to flourish outside self-enclosed ghettos of believers, it will have to meet the challenge of understanding, interacting with, and adapting to an environment that is strikingly different from those in which it has evolved.

be done if we are to make the shift from a belief-based Buddhism (version 1.0) to a praxis-based Buddhism (version 2.0). We have to train ourselves to the point where on hearing or reading a text from the canon our initial response is no longer "Is that true?" but "Does this work?

I quoted to him what I remembered of Charles Darwin: 'Judging by the past, we may safely infer that not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity...' Darwin was right, Nebogipfel said gently.

And maybe a hundred billion cephalopod minds, out in the Trojans, just light-minutes apart, have become something—" "Transcendent.

The past is altered, constantly, by our actions in the present.

But few birds flew nowadays. Why fly when there was nothing to flee

Even now the blind scalpels of evolution took raw material adapted for a vanished world, and cut and shaped it for the conditions of the new.

Five million years was plenty of time to forget, as you evolved or devolved or whatever the hell.

A sentient mind refuses to be confined by the parameters of its programming.

It wasn't yet a full language. It wasn't even as rich as a creole. But it was a start, and it was growing fast. And in a sense Mother had discovered, not invented, that basic sentence structure.

After the emergence of intelligence, the story of any biosphere tended to get a lot simpler. It was a major reason for the silence of the stars.

There is grandeur in this view of life . . . that . . . from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

We don't come into the world fully made, like the birds and the mice. We have to learn how to live.