Quotes About Evolution

people who believed the old theory thought the new theory was just as ridiculous then as you think the old theory is now.

In Michael Roes, we once again see the fundamental paradox of self-help: If it works, people should emerge from their larval state and become the fully evolved individuals SHAM vowed to help them be.

The resulting progress is astounding, outstripping our ability to appreciate the multifarious changes. Some 200 years ago the average human lifespan in the United States was 37 years; it now approaches 88! About 100 years ago, an American farmer could feed on average just four others; today, it is 200! Fifty years ago the Oxford English Dictionary weighed 300 pounds and took up 4 feet of shelf space; today, it fits on a 1-ounce flash drive or can be accessed via the Web from virtually anywhere!

Sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, nothing lasts forever.

The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in 'Metcalfe's law'—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's.

Nor should failure be considered a total loss.

It should also be noted that many girls' names, including Shirley, Carol, Leslie, Hilary, Renee, Stacy, and Tracy began life as boys' names, but girls' names almost never cross over to boys.)

given sufficient ignorance, one can doubt evolution....

Every single cell in the human body replaces itself over a period of seven years. That means there's not even the smallest part of you now that was part of you seven years ago.

We had to keep explaining things, backtracking and filling gaps. We realised our own conversations had evolved into a kind of shorthand, a tidy, neat little minimalism. Covering the whole canvas in broad obvious brushstrokes for outsiders felt like a waste of sounds, time and effort. Speaking with footnotes .

We're all going forwards and we're never coming back.

They say life is tenacious. They say given half a chance, or less, life will grow and exist and evolve anywhere, even in the most inhospitable and unlikely of places. Life will always find a way, they say.

To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." "We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special." -Steven Hawking

Not to take this web of dualities as a sign we are on the right track would be a bit like believing that God put fossils into the rocks in order to mislead Darwin about the evolution of life.

Innovations usually begin life with an attempt to solve a specific problem, but once they get into circulation, they end up triggering other changes that would have been extremely difficult to predict.

All nucleated organisms generate excess calcium as a waste product. Since at least the Cambrian times, organisms have accumulated those calcium reserves, and put them to good use: building shells, teeth, skeletons. Your ability to walk upright is due to evolution's knack for recycling its toxic waste.

Every genuinely new technology has a genuinely new way of breaking – and every now and then, those malfunctions open a new door to the adjacent possible. Sometimes the way a new technology breaks is almost as interesting as the way it works.

As Lynn Margulis writes: "All the world's bacteria essentially have access to a single gene pool and hence to the adaptive mechanisms of the entire bacterial kingdom. The speed of recombination over that of mutation is superior: it could take eukaryotic organisms a million years to adjust to a change on a worldwide scale that bacteria can accommodate in a few years.

Over generations, the gene pool of the first farmers became increasingly dominated by individuals who could drink beer on a regular basis. Most of the world's population today is made up of descendants of those early beer drinkers, and we have largely inherited their genetic tolerance for alcohol.

The lightbulb was the kind of innovation that comes together over decades, in pieces. There was no lightbulb moment in the story of the lightbulb.

Our safety depends on being able to predict the evolutionary path that viruses and bacteria will take in the coming decades, just as safety in Snow's day depended on the rational application of the scientific method to public-health matters. Superstition, then and now, is not just a threat to the truth. It's also a threat to national security.

Call it the 10/10 rule: a decade to build the new platform, and a decade for it to find a mass audience.

The computer scientist Christopher Langton observed several decades ago that innovative systems have a tendency to gravitate toward the "edge of chaos":

It is simply hard to pinpoint exactly when Darwin had the idea, because the idea didn't arrive in a flash; it drifted into his consciousness over time, in waves. In the months before the Malthus reading, we could probably say that Darwin had the idea of natural selection in his head, but at the same time was incapable of fully thinking it. This is how slow hunches often mature: by stealth, in small steps. They fade into view.