Quotes About Evolution

She created a new world for herself. It blew my mind to see this animal acquire language. And then literally reshape her world with it.

The ability to have sex gives leishmania a tremendous evolutionary advantage. It is the main reason it has thrived and spread for a hundred million years, infecting dinosaurs and people, becoming one of the most successful diseases (from its own point of view) in the world.

This was a big divergence from the way human children learn language, and that itself was interesting.

Did you know that research on gorillas has shown that they communicate using gestures? Now listen to this. An ASL-like language may very well have preceded spoken language in human development. A kind of language with gestures and vocalizations. Gradually the vocalizations took over from the gestures, because it's so much more convenient to speak than gesture.

I believe that we humans, in teaching chimpanzees and gorillas ASL, stumbled upon a natural communication system already in use. We just enhanced it. This is just my opinion and I wouldn't dare put it in a paper.

man and ape are separated more by ego than anatomy

We compared the domesticated dog with the hyena

Love, sex, family, the pleasures of food, intellectual delight, friendship, appreciation of beauty, the pleasure of exercise and good health, the excitement of sport and adventure -- all these qualities were given to us, not by God, but by evolution.

they develop slowly, beneath the surface—like a subcutaneous abscess.

Evolution extracts a price. What is the price? Sickness, old age, and death; tragedy, hunger, sorrow, pain, and suffering—all these must exist in order for evolution to operate. Without death there can be no evolution.

All living things must pay dearly for the miracle of their existence. We human beings must pay the highest price of all, because evolution has given us a brain capable of understanding death. And death lies across all our lives like some hideous, vulgar joke.

In his groundbreaking book Guns, Germs, and Steel, biologist Jared Diamond poses the question: Why did Old World diseases devastate the New World and not the other way around? Why did disease move in only one direction?* The answer lies in how the lives of Old World and New World people diverged after that cross-continental migration more than fifteen thousand years ago.

It encourages us to develop evolution's greatest gift to us: our intellects. It instructs us to appreciate this life as fully as possible, because we will never have another. This, then, is my religion.

The moment of change is the only poem

Just as your lungs breathe in and then breathe out, it's necessary for things to fall away so that life can breathe new again. This is one of the laws of the universe: that everything you see, taste, touch, and feel will eventually disappear back into the source from which it came, only to be reborn and appear yet again, receding again back into the source..

When the music changes, so does the dance

I learned (what I suppose I really knew already) that one can never go back, that one should not ever try to go back—that the essence of life is going forward. Life is really a One Way Street, isn't it?

Sometimes what you think is an end is only a beginning. And that wouldn't do at all.

Yes. She rebelled, I suppose, against being made to live in the past. After all, there's a time for everything. You can't sit in the house with the blinds down forever.

Every new development that arises is like the shake you give to a kaleidoscope—the thing changes entirely in aspect.

Murder develops. Yes, like a photograph, isn't it?" "It's very much like photography really," said Dermot. "Quite a good comparison of yours.

That rebellion of mine was an important turning point in my life.

But after a while they stopped talking about her and discussed instead who was going to win the Grand National. For, as Mr Ferguson was saying at that minute in Luxor, it is not the past that matters but the future.

The new world was the same as the old. The houses were different, the streets were called Closes, the clothes were different, the voices were different, but the human beings were the same as they always had been. And though using slightly different phraseology, the subjects of conversation were the same.