Quotes About Evolution

Am I the same person i was fifty years ago? Every molecule and cell of my body has been replaced many times over.

The future is a much bigger deal than the past

The discarded animals—the failures—had been the hippopotamus, the giraffe, the camel, the donkey, and the zebra, each one getting closer to the perfect dimensions, beauty, and balance of the horse.

Do "superego" and "id" reveal any more about our inner selves than Apollo and Dionysus? Evolutionary behavioralism and ethology may tell us more about who and how we are as scientific fact, but the poetic concentration of our traits into the personalities of gods, demons, and monsters are easier for some of us dull-witted ones to hold in our heads than the abstractions of science.

Chaos who, with a massive heave, or a great shrug, or hiccup, vomit, or cough, began the long chain of creation that has ended with pelicans and penicillin and toadstools and toads, sea lions, seals, lions, human beings, and daffodils and murder and art and love and confusion and death and madness and biscuits.

We all become history at some point, right?

Each moment, the world washes its hands of you, starts all over again. Easy as that. Wonderful as that.

All the complex life-forms that we see were formed through symbiogenesis, a term coined by the person who first recognized its existence, Lynn Margulis.

Symbiogenesis is the formation of more complex life-forms from the union of two dissimilar, simpler ones.

The self-organized bacterial membrane that is Gaia has constantly, over very long time lines, increased the complexity of its structure in order to stabilize itself and to more effectively deal with perturbations to the system.

We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet

It is not clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value.

The human race does not have a very good record of intelligent behaviour.

We believe human begins have existed for only a small fraction of cosmic history, because human race has been improving so rapidly in knowledge and technology that if people had been around for millions of years, the human race would be much further along in it's mastery.

Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change. Stephen Hawking

The computer in your cell phone today is a million times cheaper and a thousand times more powerful and about a hundred thousand time smaller than the one computer at MIT in 1965.

We have developed from the geocentric cosmologies of Ptolemy and his forebears, through the heliocentric cosmology of Copernicus and Galileo, to the modern picture in which the earth is a medium-sized planet orbiting around an average star in the outer suburbs of an ordinary spiral galaxy, which is itself only one of about a million million galaxies in the observable universe.

Anaximander, a friend and possibly a student of Thales, argued that since human infants are helpless at birth, if the first human had somehow appeared on earth as an infant, it would not have survived. In what may have been humanity's first inkling of evolution, people, Anaximander reasoned, must therefore have evolved from other animals whose young are hardier.

Science seems to have uncovered a set of laws that, within the limits set by the uncertainty principle, tell us how the universe will develop with time, if we know its state at any one time. These laws may have originally been decreed by God, but it appears that he has since left the universe to evolve according to them and does not now intervene in it.

Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change

In this way a process of evolution was started that led to the development of more and more complicated, self-reproducing organisms. The first primitive forms of life consumed various materials, including hydrogen sulfide, and released oxygen. This gradually changed the atmosphere to the composition that it has today, and allowed the development of higher forms of life such as fish, reptiles, mammals, and ultimately the human race.

Our future is a race between the growing power of our technology and the wisdom with which we use it. Let's make sure that wisdom wins.

No creo que la especie humana haya llegado tan lejos sólo para eliminarse a sí misma cuando las cosas se están poniendo interesantes.

We have seen in this chapter how, in less than half a century, man's view of the universe, formed over millennia, has been transformed.