Quotes About Evolution

Destruction is a form of creation.

People change,' she said 'Oh, no they don't. Look at me. I've never changed. It's like those sticks of rock: bite it all the way down, you'll still read Brighton. That's human nature.

It infuriated him to think that there were still people in the state who believed in a loving and merciful God. There are mystics who are said to have experienced God directly. He was a mystic, too, and what he had experienced was vacancy--a complete certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human beings who had evolved from animals for no purpose at all.

With a novel, which takes perhaps years to write, the author is not the same man he was at the end of the book as he was at the beginning. It is not only that his characters have developed--he has developed with them, and this nearly always gives a sense of roughness to the work: a novel can seldom have the sense of perfection which you find in Chekhov's story, The Lady with the Dog.

When you feel unable to change your bar you have become old.

There are mystics who are said to have experienced God directly. He was a mystic,too,and what he had experienced was vacancy-a complete certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human beings who had evolved from animals for no prose at all. He knew.

It is you who are old fashioned with your machine-guns and your gas and your talk of country.

What distant ancestors had given me this stupid conscience? Surely they were free of it when they raped and killed m their palaeolithic world.

I hope they don't repeat our mistake and invent the wheel.

My hair is beginning to go. I'll soon be glabrous.

Rats are highly intelligent creatures. If we find out anything new about the human body we experiment on rats. Rats indeed are ahead of us indisputably in one respect - they live underground. We only began to live underground during the last war. Rats have understood the danger of surface life for thousands of years. When the atom bomb falls the rat will survive.

We are used to things starting out small and simple and then progressing--evolving--to become ever more complex and sophisticated, so this is naturally what we expect to find on archaeological sites. It upsets our carefully structured ideas of how civilizations should behave, how they should mature and develop, when we are confronted by a case like Göbekli Tepe that starts out perfect at the beginning and then slowly devolves until it is just a pale shadow of its former self.

from conditions that are calculated to have been warmer and wetter than today's 13,000 years ago,70 to conditions that were colder and drier than those at the last glacial maximum just a few hundred years later.

For more than half a century, [...] American archaeology was so riddled with pre-formed opinions about how the past should look, and about the orderly, linear way in which civilizations should evolve, that it repeatedly missed, sidelined, and downright ignored evidence for any human presence at all prior to Clovis--until, at any rate, the mass of that evidence became so overwhelming that it took the existing paradigm by storm.

Eight thousand years is a very long time but

Viable offspring capable of reproduction resulted from all these liaisons and in August 2018, Denisova Cave obliged yet again by yielding up a bone fragment, more than 50,000 years old and in sufficiently good condition for genome sequencing. It turned out to have belonged to a female, about 13 years of age, who had a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father.57

the principle known as "uniformitarianism." This is the assumption that existing processes, acting as at present, are sufficient to account for all geological changes.

Anyway, I'm not one for labels: they change every couple of years like the hemlines on women's skirts.

She used to think that he was so stocky, and bull-like, but now he felt like a laundry bag filled with old coat hangers.

It's not so much that history is simply cyclical, it seems to progress via recursive, repeated fractal patterns with minute variations.

These characters were like twelve-bar blues or other chord progressions. Given the basic parameters of Batman, different creators could play very different music.

Pop, like Chronos the Titan, always eats its darlings.

Home is run no more.

She didn't want to change just to be better. Though there was always better to aspire for. It was very confused.