Quotes About Evolution

the complexity of society does not imply a planner.

This book argues that evolution is happening all around us. It is the best way of understanding how the human world changes, as well as the natural world. Change in human institutions, artefacts and habits is incremental, inexorable and inevitable. It follows a narrative, going from one stage to the next; it creeps rather than jumps; it has its own spontaneous momentum

Henry's novel The Portrait of a Lady was written in thrall to Darwin's idea of female choice as a force in evolution.

Education, done properly, is an emergent, evolutionary phenomenon.

Technology will find its inventors, rather than vice versa.

There has probably never been a generation since the paleolithic that did not deplore the fecklessness of the next and worship a golden memory of the past.

the Stone Age did not come to an end for lack of stone.

In fact the discoveries of Gregor Mendel, which became known to the world in 1900, ought to have killed eugenics stone dead.

Some are worse off than they were just a few months or years before. But the vast majority of people are much better fed, much better sheltered, much better entertained, much better protected against disease and much more likely to live to old age than their ancestors have ever been. The availability of almost everything a person could want or need has been going rapidly upwards for 200 years and erratically upwards for 10,000 years before

Neanderthals had all of these: huge brains, probably complex languages, lots of technology. But they never burst out of their niche. It is my contention that in looking inside our heads, we would be looking in the wrong place to explain this extraordinary capacity for change in the species. It was not something that happened within a brain. It was some thing that happened between brains. It was a collective phenomenon. Look

A corollary of this perspective is that there is no such thing as a perfect market, an equilibrium or an end state.

Good things are gradual; bad things are sudden. Above all, good things evolve.

that the flywheel of history is incremental change through trial and error, with innovation driven by recombination, and that this pertains in far more kinds of things than merely those that have genes. This

This was socialism without the state. There is no doubt that it would have continued to expand and evolve.

Smith went one step further, and suggested that morality emerged unbidden and unplanned from a peculiar feature of human nature: sympathy.

The traditional university will surely be gone in fifty years, swept away by technology.

A species that over many generations repeatedly exposes itself to some experience will eventually find its offspring selected for a genetic predisposition to cope with that experience. Why?

all gods and all superstitions emerge from within human minds, and go through characteristic but unplanned transformations as history unfolds. Thus even the most top–down feature of human culture is actually a bottom–up, emergent phenomenon. O'Grady

China today has the economy of a twenty-first-century economic superpower with a political regime little changed since the 1950s. Is this slow evolution in political institutions down to the concentration or the dispersion of power?

We are perforce in some sense constrained, goaded, or at least affected by the accumulated impact of selective decisions made over thousands of generations.

The mind drives the body, which drives the genome.

evolutionary biologist Ryan Gregory put it, anyone who thinks he or she can assign a function to every letter in the human genome should be asked why an onion needs a genome that is about five times larger than a person's. Who's resorting

Anyway, if you really want to see the Arpanet as the origin of the internet, please explain why the government sat on it for thirty years and did almost nothing with it until it was effectively privatised in the 1990s, with explosive results.

nature has never found human incomprehension a reason for changing her methods.