Quotes About Evolution

President Barack Obama's observation that the prime minister had "one foot in the old ways of doing business and one foot in the new," Putin said, "We don't spread our legs.

Sometimes I discover I have changed my mind because I have forgotten what I used to think.

reality is that we all make mistakes, which ultimately make us

To put my explanation in its boldest and most surprising form: bad news is manmade, top–down, purposed stuff, imposed on history. Good news is accidental, unplanned, emergent stuff that gradually evolves. The things that go well are largely unintended; the things that go badly are largely intended.

It is my proposition that the human race has become a collective problem-solving machine and it solves problems by changing its ways. It

A four-letter alphabet called DNA.

The struggle for existence never gets easier. However well a species may adapt to its environment, it can never relax, because its competitors and its enemies are also adapting to their niches. Survival is a zero-sum game.

In history, and in evolution, progress is always a futile, Sisyphean struggle to stay in the same relative place by getting ever better at things. Cars move through the congested streets of London no faster than horse-drawn carriages did a century ago. Computers have no effect on productivity because people learn to complicate and repeat tasks that have been made easier.

I want to do for every aspect of the human world a little bit of what Charles Darwin did for biology, and get you to see past the illusion of design, to see the emergent, unplanned, inexorable and beautiful process of change that lies underneath.

Humanity is, of course, morally free to make and remake itself infinitely, but we do not do so.

The big firms that survive will do so by turning themselves into bottom-up evolvers.

Then there appeared upon the earth a new kind of hominid, which refused to play by the rules. Without any changes in its body, and without any succession of species, it just kept changing its habits. For the first time its technology changed faster than its anatomy. This was an evolutionary novelty, and you are it. When

In other words, cooking encourages specialisation by sex. The first and deepest division of labour is the sexual one.

Language is just as rule-based in its newest slang forms, and just as sophisticated as it ever was in ancient Rome. But the rules, now as then, are written from below, not from above.

An evolutionary bargain seems to have been struck: in exchange for sexual exclusivity, the man brings meat and protects the fire from thieves and bullies; in exchange for help rearing the children, the woman brings veg and does much of the cooking. This may explain why human beings are the only great apes with long pair bonds. Just

Our habits and our institutions, from language to cities, are constantly changing, and the mechanism of change turns out to be surprisingly Darwinian: it is gradual, undirected, mutational, inexorable, combinatorial, selective and in some vague sense progressive.

The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976 coined the term 'meme' for a unit of cultural imitation.

For far too long we have underestimated the power of spontaneous, organic and constructive change driven from below, in our obsession with designing change from above. Embrace the general theory of evolution. Admit that everything evolves.

Because bodies do not replicate themselves but are grown, whereas genes do replicate themselves, it inevitably follows that the body is merely an evolutionary vehicle for the gene, rather than vice versa.

almost all biologists agreed that no creature could ever evolve the ability to help its species at the expense of itself. Only when the two interests coincided would it act selflessly.

The obsession with which those on the right resist Charles Darwin's insight – that the complexity of nature does not imply a designer – matches the obsession with which those on the left resist Adam Smith's insight – that the complexity of society does not imply a planner.

The idea that the State originated to serve any kind of social purpose is completely unhistorical. It originated in conquest and confiscation – that is to say, in crime.' Perhaps we have left all that behind, and the state is now evolving steadily towards benign and gentle virtue. Perhaps not. Tudor

Further evidence for the man-made nature of gods comes from their evolutionary history. It is a little-known fact, but gods evolve.

Humanity is experiencing an extraordinary burst of evolutionary change, driven by good old-fashioned Darwinian natural selection. But it is selection among ideas, not among genes. The habitat in which these ideas reside consists of human brains.