c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change.
— Leon C. Megginson
At bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
The chicken is only an egg’s way for making another egg.
— Richard Dawkins
Human beings are so destructive. I sometimes think we're a kind of plague, that will scrub the earth clean. We destroy things so well that I sometimes think, maybe that's our function. Maybe every few eons, some animal comes along that kills off the rest of the world, clears the decks, and lets evolution proceed to its next phase.
— Michael Crichton, The Lost World
If evolution really works, how come mothers only have two hands?
— Milton Berle
Evolution could so easily be disproved if just a single fossil turned up in the wrong date order. Evolution has passed this test with flying colours.
— Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution
Perhaps our greatest distinction as a species is our capacity, unique among animals, to make counter-evolutionary choices.
— Jared Diamond, Why Is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality
If only we could have talked to you, the hive-queen said in Ender's words. But since it could not be, we ask only this: that you remember us, not as enemies, but as a tragic sisters, changed into foul shape by fate or God or evolution. If we had kissed, it would have been the miracle to make us human in each other's eyes. Instead we killed each other. But still we welcome you now as guestfriends. Come into our home, daughters of Earth; dwell in our tunnels, harvest our fields; what we cannot do, you are now our hands to do for us. Blossom, trees; ripen, fields; be warm for them, suns; be fertile for them, planets: they are our adopted daughters, and they have come home.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game
Humans have evolved to their relatively high state by retaining the immature characteristics of their ancestors. Humans are the most advanced of mammals – although a case could be made for the dolphins – because they seldom grow up. Behavioral traits such as curiosity about the world, flexibility of response, and playfulness are common to practically all young mammals but are usually rapidly lost with the onset of maturity in all but humans. Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.
— Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker
It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that).
— Richard Dawkins
We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realize that we are apes.
— Richard Dawkins, A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love
Today we are fighting Communism. Okay. If I'd been alive fifty years ago, the brand of Conservatism we have today would have been damn near called Communism and we should have been told to go and fight that. History is moving pretty quickly these days and the heroes and villains keep on changing parts.
— Ian Fleming, Casino Royale
Most species do their own evolving, making it up as they go along, which is the way Nature intended. And this is all very natural and organic and in tune with mysterious cycles of the cosmos, which believes that there's nothing like millions of years of really frustrating trial and error to give a species moral fiber and, in some cases, backbone.
— Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man
We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God.
— Pope Benedict XVI
The only thing binding individuals together is ideas. Ideas mutate and spread
—  they change their hosts as much as their hosts change them.
Nevertheless, it is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
— H.L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy
It wasn't torpor that kept her - she was often restless to the point of irritability. She simply liked to feel that she was prevented from leaving, that she was needed.
— Ian McEwan, Atonement
The material you work with is that which you will come to resemble. That which you work against will always work against you, including yourself.
— Henry Rollins, The Portable Henry Rollins
Accepting evolution does not force us to jettison our morals and ethics, and rejecting evolution does not ensure their constancy.
— Michael Shermer, Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design
Now times had changed, and the inherited wisdom of the past had become folly.
— Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey
For our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behavior. We innovate new behavior to adapt.
— Michael Crichton, The Lost World
Origin of man now proved.—Metaphysics must flourish.—He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.
— Charles Darwin, Notebooks
Evolutionarily speaking, there is seldom any mystery in why we seek the goals we seek — why, for example, people would rather make love with an attractive partner than get a slap on the belly with a wet fish.
— Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works
The franchise and the virus work on the same principle, what thrives in one place will thrive in another. You just have to find a sufficiently virulent business plan, condense it into a three-ring binder ― its DNA ― Xerox it, and embed it in the fertile line of a well-traveled highway, preferably one with a left turn lane. Then the growth will expand until it runs up against its property lines.
— Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
He acts like an animal, has an animal's habits! Eats like one, moves like one, talks like one! There's even something -sub-human -something not quite to the stage of humanity yet! Yes, something - ape-like about him, like one of those pictures I've seen in - anthropological studies! Thousands and thousands of years have passed him right by, and there he is - Stanley Kowalski - survivor of the Stone Age! Bearing the raw meat home from the kill in the jungle! And you - you here - waiting for him! Maybe he'll strike you or maybe grunt and kiss you! That is, if kisses have been discovered yet! Night falls and the other apes gather! There in the front of the cave, all grunting like him, and swilling and gnawing and hulking! His poker night! - you call it - this party of apes! Somebody growls - some creature snatches at something - the fight is on! God! Maybe we are a long way from beng made in God's image, but Stella - my sister - there has been some progress since then! Such things as art - as poetry and music - such kinds of new light have come into the world since then! In some kinds of people some tendered feelings have had some little beginning! That we have got to make grow! And cling to, and hold as our flag! In this dark march towards what-ever it is we're approaching . . . Don't - don't hang back with the brutes!
— Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire
people believe in God because the world is very complicated and they think it is very unlikely that anything as complicated as a flying squirrel or the human eye or a brain could happen by chance.
— Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Many older physicians had gone to their graves calling Pasteur a liar, a fool, or worse---and without examining evidence which their “common sense” told them was impossible.
— Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
When you consider it from a human perspective, and clearly it would be difficult for us to do otherwise, life is an odd thing. It couldn't wait to get going, but then, having gotten going, it seemed in very little hurry to move on.
— Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything
Evolution is not a genetically controlled distortion of one adult form into another
—  it is a genetically controlled alteration in a developmental program.
In time the earth will be inhabited by almost god-like beings who shall analyze and discuss the remnants of humanity as we now discuss the chimpanzee.
— Ella Wheeler Wilcox
I've been in love for five hundred million years…
— Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics
As his body became more and more defenseless, so his means of offense became steadily more frightful.
— Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey
Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution? I suspect that it does; I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick extinction. Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and without courage all other virtues are useless. Therefore the frogs, the toads, keep on singing even though we know, if they don't, that the sound of their uproar must surely be luring all the snakes and ringtail cats and kit foxes and coyotes and great horned owls toward the scene of their happiness.
— Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire
When you're young, all evolution lies before you, every road is open to you, and at the same time you can enjoy the fact of being there on the rock, flat mollusk-pulp, damp and happy.
— Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics
If the second dinosaur to the left of the tall cycad tree had not happened to sneeze and thereby fail to catch the tiny, shrew-like ancestor of all the mammals, we should none of us be here.
— Richard Dawkins, An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist
Disaster is a natural part of my evolution toward tragedy and dissolution.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
It is failure that guides evolution; perfection provides no incentive for improvement, and nothing is perfect.
— Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist
Things exist either because they have recently come into existence or because they have qualities that made them unlikely to be destroyed in the past.
— Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design
Now, science cannot completely exclude the possibility of supernatural explanation. It is possible - though very unlikely - that our whole world is controlled by elves.
— Jerry A. Coyne, Why Evolution Is True
But complex animals had obtained their adaptive flexibility at some cost--they had traded one dependency for another. It was no longer necessary to change their bodies to adapt, because now their adaptation was behavior, socially determined. That behavior required learning. In a sense, among higher animals adaptive fitness was no longer transmitted to the next generation by DNA at all. It was now carried by teaching.
— Michael Crichton, The Lost World
Random chance is not sufficient to explain random chance. ~Jubal Harshaw
— Robert A. Heinlein
What's the matter? What's the antimatter? Does it antimatter?
— Wes "Scoop" Nisker
In a perfectly designed world —one with no history— we would not have to suffer everything from hemorrhoids to cancer.
— Neil Shubin, Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body
Obsolescence is a fate devoutly to be wished, lest science stagnate and die.
— Stephen Jay Gould
I am an enthusiastic Darwinian, but I think Darwinism is too big a theory to be confined to the narrow context of the gene.
— Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
But just in proportion as this process of extermination has acted on an enormous scale, so must the number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed, be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record.
— Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species
Current utility and historical origin are different subjects.
— Stephen Jay Gould
It's striking that Native Americans evolved no devastating epidemic diseases to give to Europeans in return for the many devastating epidemic diseases that Indians received from the Old World.
— Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
I didn't know what kind of creature I was supposed to be until I woke on a hospital cot and was informed I had died. Nobody ever told me what I was. I figured I was broken. But it turns out that my scars were divine signs that I was granted a chance to begin again.
— Hannah Ashworth, Beyond Polaris
Life is never static. Despite catastrophic tragedies, life has persisted in evolving new varieties of unimaginable forms. I find comfort in the narrative of evolutionary history.
— Greg Graffin, Anarchy Evolution: Faith, Science, and Bad Religion in a World Without God
The conditions necessary for devastating epidemics or pandemics just didn't exist until the agricultural revolution. The claim that modern medicine and sanitation save us from infectious diseases that ravaged pre-agricultural people (something we hear often) is like arguing that seat belts and air bags protect us from car crashes that were fatal to our prehistoric ancestors.
— Cacilda Jethá, Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality
I mean to say, we all sprang from humble origins. Goodness gracious, who would have thought that a species of monkey would take over the kingdom of the world. … I cannot help but feel that the monkey was not a good choice. Surely one of the cat family would have been much more satisfactory. They have a much less emotional approach to life. ("The Shadmock")
— R. Chetwynd-Hayes
When things get bad enough, then something happens to correct the course. And it's for that reason that I speak about evolution as an error-making and an error-correcting process. And if we can be ever so much better - ever so much slightly better - at error correcting than at error making, then we'll make it.
— Jonas Salk
I had written the sentence, 'You mustn't think that the evolution that gave rise to us was the only evolutionary possibility on this planet. . . . that cultural developments could be shaped through the mediation of another animal species. If the biological conditions were favorable, some civilization not inferior to our own could arise in the depths of the sea. . . . Would it do the same stupid things mankind has done? Would it invite the same historical calamities? What would we say if some animal other than man declared that its education and its numbers gave it the sole right to occupy the entire world and hold sway over all creation?
— Karel Čapek
We are one of many appearances of the thing called Life; we are not its perfect image, for it has no perfect image except Life, and life is multitudinous and emergent in the stream of time.
— Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey
When we no longer look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship, as at something wholly beyond his comprehension; when we regard every production of nature as one which has had a history; when we contemplate every complex structure and instinct as the summing up of many contrivances, each useful to the possessor, nearly in the same way as when we look at any great mechanical invention as the summing up of the labour, the experience, the reason, and even the blunders of numerous workmen; when we thus view each organic being, how far more interesting, I speak from experience, will the study of natural history become!
— Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species
The debate that has been conducted in terms of "creation versus evolution" has gotten caught up with all kinds of other debates, and this has provided a singularly unhelpful backdrop to the would-be serious discussion of other parts of the Bible.
— N.T. Wright, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense
It is certain that such a revolution in thought - that is, such an expansion of consciousness, such an evolution of intelligence - is not the result of a whim. It is in fact a question of a cosmic influence to which the earth, along with everything in it, is subjected. A phase in the gestation of the planetary particle of our solar system is completed. Gaston Bachelard observes, in this connection, what he calls “a mutation of Spirit.” A new period must begin, and this is heralded by seismic movement, climate changes, and finally, above all, by the spirit that animates man.
— Schwaller de Lubicz
But it had been widely argued that advanced intelligence could never arise in the sea
—  there were not enough challenges in so benign and unvarying an environment.
But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?[To William Graham 3 July 1881]
— Charles Darwin
We were not designed rationally, but are products of a convoluted history.
— Neil Shubin, Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body
Of all the problems which will have to be faced in the future, in my opinion, the most difficult will be those concerning the treatment of the inferior races of mankind.
— Leonard Darwin
Alas, our technology has marched ahead of our spiritual and social evolution, making us, frankly, a dangerous people.
— Steven M. Greer
It looks as if the offspring have eyes so that they can see well (bad, teleological, backward causation), but that's an illusion. The offspring have eyes because their parents' eyes did see well (good, ordinary, forward causation).
— Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works
The many meanings of 'evolution' are frequently exploited by Darwinists to distract their critics. Eugenie Scott recommends: 'Define evolution as an issue of the history of the planet: as the way we try to understand change through time. The present is different from the past. Evolution happened, there is no debate within science as to whether it happened, and so on... I have used this approach at the college level.' Of course, no college student—indeed, no grade-school dropout— doubts that 'the present is different from the past.' Once Scott gets them nodding in agreement, she gradually introduces them to 'The Big Idea' that all species—including monkeys and humans—are related through descent from a common ancestor... This tactic is called 'equivocation'—changing the meaning of a term in the middle of an argument.
— Jonathan Wells, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design
A four-letter alphabet called DNA.
— Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature
You want proof evolution is for real, don’t waste your time with fossils; just check out the New York City rat. They started out as immigrants, stowaways in some ship’s cargo hold. Only the survivors got to breed, and they’ve been improving with every new litter. Smarter, faster, stronger. Getting ready to rule. Manhattan wouldn’t be the ﬁrst island they took over.
— Andrew Vachss, Another Life
Koch's youthful idealism about libertarianism had largely devolved into a rationale for corporate self-interest.
— John Charles Chasteen, Born in Blood and Fire: A Concise History of Latin America
As I said earlier it is most surprising that the kingdom of then world should have come under the sway of a species of monkey, and there is reason to suppose that there were other claimants to the throne. ("The Shadmock")
— R. Chetwynd-Hayes
As natural selection acts by competition, it adapts the inhabitants of each country only in relation to the degree of perfection of their associates; so that we need feel no surprise at the inhabitants of any one country, although on the ordinary view supposed to have been specially created and adapted for that country, being beaten and supplanted by the naturalised productions from another land.
— Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species
Perhaps the most legitimately dispiriting thing about reciprocal altruism is that it is a misnomer. Whereas with kin selection the "goal" of our genes is to actually help another organism, with reciprocal altruism the goal is that the organism be left under the impression that we've helped; the impression alone is enough to bring the reciprocation.
— Robert Wright
...the student of prehistoric man...cannot reject [the Castenedolo skull] as false without doing injury to his sense of truth, and he cannot accept it as fact without shattering his accepted beliefs.
— Arthur Keith
Inside our skulls are fish, reptile and shrew brains, as well as the highest centers that allow us to integrate information in our unique way; and some of our newer brain components talk to each other via some very ancient structures indeed. Our brains are makeshift structures, opportunistically assembled by Nature over hundreds of millions of years, and in multiple different ecological contexts.
— Ian Tattersall
Love, I have always known, is an evolutionary trait. It is a delicately tuned, intricate, sensitive impulse, but a trait nevertheless, a reaction honed by millions of years of an ever-changing and complex mating instinct.
— David Bajo
Probably went swimming and got eaten by a pineapple.
— Terry Pratchett
...evolution propels itself by an inclination toward its next probable achievement." ("Desire")
— William S. Wilson, Why I Don't Write Like Franz Kafka
If the lambs were flying, wolves would have also the wings to fly!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
In evolutionary terms, that means we asked for it.
— Sharon Moalem, Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease
The geologic cycle is a bunch of balarky.
— Arthur C. Howard
The geologic column is a bunch of balarky.
— Arthur C. Howard
Nobody can imagine how nothing could turn into something. Nobody can get an inch nearer to it by explaining how something could turn into something else. It is really far more logical to start by saying ‘In the beginning God created heaven and earth’ even ifyou only mean ‘In the beginning some unthinkable power began some unthinkable process.’ For God is by its nature aname of mystery, and nobody ever supposed that man could imagine how a world was created any more than he couldcreate one. But evolution really is mistaken for explanation. It has the fatal quality of leaving on many minds the impression that they do understand it and everything else
— G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man
An event is not any more intrinsically intelligible or unintelligible because of the pace at which it moves. For a man who does not believe in a miracle, a slow miracle would be just as incredible as a swift one. The Greek witch may have turned sailors to swine with a stroke of the wand. But to see a naval gentleman of our acquaintance looking a little more like a pig every day, till he ended with four trotters and a curly tail, would not be any more soothing. It might be rather more creepy and uncanny.
— G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man
The Universe was a damned silly place at best . . . but the least likely explanation for its existence was the no-explanation of random chance, the conceit that some abstract somethings "just happened" to be some atoms that "just happened" to get together in configurations which "just happened" to look like consistent laws and then some of these configurations "just happened" to possess self-awareness and that two such "just happened" to be the Man from Mars and the other a bald-headed old coot with Jubal himself inside. No, Jubal would not buy the "just happened" theory, popular as it was with men who called themselves scientists. Random chance was not a sufficient explanation of the Universe--in fact, random chance was not sufficient to explain random chance; the pot could not hold itself.
— Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
Individual humans are not super, but the organism of which we are all tiny cellular parts is most certainly that. The life-form that's so big we forget it's there, that turns minerals on its planet into tools to touch the infinite black gap between stars or probe the obliterating pressures at the bottom of the oceans. We are already part of a superbeing, a monster, a god, a living process that is so all encompassing that it is to an individual life what water is to a fish. We are cells in the body of a three-billion-year-old life-form whose roots are in the Precambrian oceans and whose genetic wiring extends through the living structures of everything on the planet, connecting everything that has ever lived in one immense nervous system.
— Grant Morrison, Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human
Considering the way the prebiotic soup is referred to in so many discussions of the origin of life as an already established reality, it comes as something of a shock to realize that there is absolutely no positive evidence for its existence.
— Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory In Crisis
My firm conviction is that if wide-spread Eugenic reforms are not adopted during the next hundred years or so, our Western Civilization is inevitably destined to such a slow and gradual decay as that which has been experienced in the past by every great ancient civilization. The size and the importance of the United States throws on you a special responsibility in your endeavours to safeguard the future of our race. Those who are attending your Congress will be aiding in this endeavour, and though you will gain no thanks from your own generation, posterity will, I believe, learn to realize the great dept it owes to all the workers in this field.
— Leonard Darwin
There are animals we haven't stopped by. Don't think they're harmless. Life will defend itself no matter how small it is.
— Yann Martel, Life of Pi
But why live in these environments at all? What possessed fish to get out of the water or live in the margins? Think of this: virtually every fish swimming in these 375-million-year-old streams was a predator of some kind. Some were up to sixteen feet long, almost twice the size of the largest Tiktaalik. The most common fish species we find alongside Tiktaalik is seven feet long and has a head as wide as a basketball. The teeth are barbs the size of railroad spikes. Would you want to swim in these ancient streams?
— Neil Shubin, Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body
Not that chance dominated events in the early Solar System, for scientific determinism was also functioning. But chance is an essential factor in all evolutionary events, and the birth and development of our planetary system were not exceptions.
— Eric Chaisson, Epic of Evolution: Seven Ages of the Cosmos
Dedicated to the memory of MY FATHER. For if I had not believed that he would have wished me to give such help as I could toward making his life's work of service to mankind, I should never have been led to write this book.
— Leonard Darwin, The Need For Eugenic Reform
But one way or another competing and weeding takes place . . . or a race goes downhill.
— Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
...avacados, prickly pears and papayas used to be gulped down whole, seeds and all, by fridge-sized armadillos called glyptodonts.
— Adam Leith Gollner, The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce, and Obsession
It is a total mystery how we evolved minds capable of piloting cars through wild maneuvers using a wrist to steep while shouting at a cell phone. The creationists are fools for focusing on animal evolution. Darwin explains nature! He has more difficulty explaining us.
— David Brin
In the past the man has been first
—  in the future the system must be first.
Darwinism is dynamic. It is about change, not stasis; about process, not pattern; about tales, not tableaux; about becoming, not being.
— Henry Gee, In Search of Deep Time
Life is unlikely to end with humans, even if we burn in a nuclear holocaust. The relentless wheel of evolution will pick up from where we leave off and roll to it's predestined goal. If the human mind continues to evolve, enlarge, and expand, so that we are able to recognize our kinship with the creations around us, so that we are able to grasp our oneness with the cosmos, and so that we merge in yoga with the Divine, the long cosmic cycle will disclose its cryptic secret, and the long saga of billions of years of evolution will display its profound significance.
— Roy J. Mathew
Natural selection is a blind and undirected consequence of the interaction between variation and the environment. Natural selection exists only in the continuous present of the natural world: it has no memory of its previous actions, no plans for the future, or underlying purpose.
— Henry Gee, In Search of Deep Time
have no doubt, this technology will — someday, somewhere — be used to change the genome of our own species in ways that are heritable, forever altering the genetic composition of human kind.
— Jennifer A. Doudna, A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution
Today we recognize that the emotion of disgust evolved as an unconscious defense against biological contamination.
— Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
If someone drowned at sea a couple of hundred years ago they’d either start to decompose immediately or they’d get eaten by fish or other scavengers. The bones would eventually sink down to the seabed and either be slowly buried by marine silt or broken down further over the years, but the flesh would one way or another eventually become water, which would evaporate into clouds and then rain down upon the earth once again to become plants and flowers.The flowers in your garden could once have been famous pirates such as Blackbeard or Calico Jack.
— Karl Wiggins, Shit my History Teacher DID NOT tell me!
Above all we should, in the century since Darwin, have come to know that man, while now captain of the adventuring ship, is hardly the sole object of its quest, and that his prior assumptions to this effect arose from the simple necessity of whistling in the dark.
— Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There
Highly social animals like dogs and chimpanzees who live in small groups evolved to be more tolerant in subordinate roles. The fact that young bears behave more like young humans suggests common influences upon their social behaviour.
— Benjamin Kilham
Perhaps if one less dragonfly had drowned in the Carboniferous swamps, the intelligent organisms on our planet today would have feathers and teach their young in rookeries. The pattern of evolutionary causality is a web of astonishing complexity; the incompleteness of our understanding humbles us.
— Carl Sagan, Cosmos
The researchers looked deeper into these observations, in hopes of gaining insight into the mechanisms underlying the high evolutionary rate and extraordinary immunologic plasticity of influenza HA. They probed in more detail the precise codons that are used by the virus to encode the influenza HA1 protein. The discriminated between codons on the basis of volatility. Each three-nucleotide codon is related by a single nucleotide change to nine 'mutational neighbours.' Of those nine mutations, some proportion change the codon to a synonymous codon and some change it to a nonsynonymous one, which directs the incorporation of a different amino acid into the protein. More volatile codons are those for which a larger proportion of those nine mutational neighbours encode an amino acid change. The use of particular codons in a gene at a frequency that is disproportionate to their random selection for encoding a chosen amino acid is termed codon bias. Such bias is common and is influenced by many factors, but here the collaborators found strong evidence for codon bias that was particular for and restricted to the amino acids making up the HA1 epitopes. Remarkably, they observed that influenza employs a disproportionate number of volatile codons in its epitope-coding sequences. There was a bias for the use of codons that had the fewest synonymous mutational neighbours. In other words, influenza HA1 appears to have optimized the speed with which it can change amino acids in its epitopes. Amino acid changes can arise from fewer mutational events. The antibody combining regions are optimized to use codons that have a greater likelihood to undergo nonsynonymous single nucleotide substitutions : they are optimized for rapid evolution.
— Michael G Cordingley, Viruses: Agents of Evolutionary Invention
We evolve, that means our life’s purpose and perception changes from time to time because we are a part of an infinitely long chain of evolution which is doomed to death.
— Bhavik Sarkhedi
The telescope, in enabling us to look far out into space, also allows us to look back in time. Light travels at about 186,000 miles per second. When we look up into the daylight sky, we are not seeing the sun as it currently is but as it was about eight minutes ago, since it takes that long for the light radiating from this familiar star to travel 93 million miles to Earth. Similarly, when the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) receives light waves from the depths of the universe, those waves will have originated from points as far as 76 sextillion (76,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) miles away. It will have taken those waves some 13 billion years to arrive on earth, meaning they left their source about a million years after the big bang, and roughly nine to ten billion years before Earth even formed.
— Richard Kurin, The Smithsonian's History of America in 101 Objects
Evolution by natural selection is the explanation for why we exist. It is not something to guide our lives in our own society. If we were to be guided by the evolution principle, then we would be living in a kind of ultra-Thatcherite, Reaganite society.”“Study your Darwinism for two reasons,” he implored, “because it explains why you’re here, and the second reason is, study your Darwinism in order to learn what to avoid in setting up society. What we need is a truly anti-Darwinian society. Anti-Darwinian in the sense that we don’t wish to live in a society where the weakest go to the wall, where the strongest suppress the weak, and even kill the weak. We — I, at least — do not wish to live in that kind of society. I want to live in the sort of society where we take care of the sick, where we take care of the weak, take care of the oppressed, which is a very anti-Darwinian society.
— Richard Dawkins
Evolution by natural selection is the explanation for why we exist. It is not something to guide our lives in our own society. If we were to be guided by the evolution principle, then we would be living in a kind of ultra-Thatcherite, Reaganite society.Study your Darwinism for two reasons - because it explains why you’re here, and the second reason is, study your Darwinism in order to learn what to avoid in setting up society. What we need is a truly anti-Darwinian society. Anti-Darwinian in the sense that we don’t wish to live in a society where the weakest go to the wall, where the strongest suppress the weak, and even kill the weak. We — I, at least — do not wish to live in that kind of society. I want to live in the sort of society where we take care of the sick, where we take care of the weak, take care of the oppressed, which is a very anti-Darwinian society.
— Richard Dawkins
If you look at the picture of a beautiful bird eating a little fish, you will see two victims there: Fish is already a victim; but the bird is also a victim because to survive, it has to be a killer; it is forced to be a murderer!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
When you see a lion tearing apart a zebra, what sort of divine order you see there? What we see there is nothing but savagery, injustice and chaos, in short, we see a primitive disorder, we see an evolutionary cruelty and a primitive disturbance deprived of any kind of ethics!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Forget the buildings and the monuments. Let the softness of dark come in, all those light-years between stars and planets. Cities were the works of men but the earth before and after those cities, outside and beneath and around them, was the dream of a sleeping leviathan--it was god sleeping there and dreaming, the same god that was time and transfiguration. From whatever dreamed the dream at the source, atom or energy, flowed all the miracles of evolution--tiger, tiger burning bright, the massive whales in the deep, luminescent specters in their mystery. The pearls that were their eyes, their tongues that were wet leaves, their bodies that were the bodies of the fantastic. Spectacular bestiaries of heaven, the limbs and tails of the gentle and the fearsome, silent or raging at will . . . they could never be known in every detail and they never should be.
— Lydia Millet, How the Dead Dream
It is hard for us to imagine now, but our earliest human ancestors who ventured out onto the grasslands of East Africa some six million years ago were remarkably weak and vulnerable creatures. They stood less than five feet tall. They walked upright and could run on their two legs, but nowhere near as fast as the swift predators on four legs that pursued them. They were skinny—their arms could not provide much defense. They had no claws or fangs or poison to resort to if under attack. To gather fruits, nuts, and insects, or to scavenge dead meat, they had to move out into the open savanna where they became easy prey to leopards or packs of hyenas. So weak and small in number, they might have easily become extinct.And yet within the space of a few million years (remarkably short on the time scale of evolution), these rather physically unimpressive ancestors of ours transformed themselves into the most formidable hunters on the planet. What could possibly account for such a miraculous turnaround?
— Robert Greene
Our earliest ancestors were descended from primates who thrived for millions of years in a treetop environment, and who in the process had evolved one of the most remarkable visual systems in nature. To move quickly and efficiently in such a world, they developed extremely sophisticated eye and muscle coordination. Their eyes slowly evolved into a full-frontal position on the face, giving them binocular, stereoscopic vision. This system provides the brain a highly accurate three-dimensional and detailed perspective, but is rather narrow. Animals that possess such vision—as opposed to eyes on the side or half side—are generally efficient predators like owls or cats. They use this powerful sight to home in on prey in the distance. Tree-living primates evolved this vision for a different purpose—to navigate branches, and to spot fruits, berries, and insects with greater effectiveness. They also evolved elaborate color vision.
— Robert Greene, Mastery
When our earliest human ancestors left the trees and moved to the open grasslands of the savanna, they adopted an upright stance. Possessing already this powerful visual system, they could see far into the distance (giraffes and elephants might stand taller, but their eyes are on the sides, giving them instead panoramic vision). This allowed them to spot dangerous predators far away on the horizon and detect their movements even in twilight. Given a few seconds or minutes, they could plot a safe retreat. At the same time, if they focused on what was nearest at hand, they could identify all kinds of important details in their environment—footprints and signs of passing predators, or the colors and shapes of rocks that they could pick up and perhaps use as tools.
— Robert Greene, Mastery
n the treetops, this powerful vision was built for speed—seeing and reacting quickly. On the open grassland, it was the opposite. Safety and finding food relied upon slow, patient observation of the environment, on the ability to pick out details and focus on what they might mean. Our ancestors’ survival depended on the intensity of their attention. The longer and harder they looked, the more they could distinguish between an opportunity and a danger. If they simply scanned the horizon quickly they could see a lot more, but this would overload the mind with information—too many details for such sharp vision. The human visual system is not built for scanning, as a cow’s is, but for depth of focus.
— Robert Greene, Mastery
Animals are locked in a perpetual present. They can learn from recent events, but they are easily distracted by what is in front of their eyes. Slowly, over a great period of time, our ancestors overcame this basic animal weakness. By looking long enough at any object and refusing to be distracted—even for a few seconds—they could momentarily detach themselves from their immediate surroundings. In this way they could notice patterns, make generalizations, and think ahead. They had the mental distance to think and reflect, even on the smallest scale.These early humans evolved the ability to detach and think as their primary advantage in the struggle to avoid predators and find food. It connected them to a reality other animals could not access. Thinking on this level was the single greatest turning point in all of evolution—the emergence of the conscious, reasoning mind.
— Robert Greene, Mastery
Teaching the myth of creation to the students instead of teaching them the fact of evolution is nothing but an act of ultimate ignorance!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Papa always said that in the beginning men and women roamed the world together, equal in strength - like lions and tigers -""And giraffes?" interpolated Colonel Race slyly. I laughed. Everyone makes fun of that giraffe."And giraffes. They were nomadic, you see. It wasn't till they settled down in communities, and women did one kind of thing and men another, that women got weak. And of course, underneath, one is still the same - one feels the same, I mean - and that is why women worship physical strength in men - it's what they once had and have lost.""Almost ancestor worship, in fact?" "Something of the kind.""And you really think that's true? That women worship strength, I mean?""I think it's quite true - if one's honest. You think you admire moral qualities,but when you fall in love, you revert to the primitive where the physical is all that counts. But I don't think that's the end, if you lived in primitive conditions it would be all right, but you don't - and so, in the end, the other thing wins after all. It's the things that are apparently conquered that always do win, isn't it? They win in the only way that counts. Like what the Bible says about losing your life and finding it.”.“In the end," said Colonel Race thoughtfully, "you fall in love - and you fall out of it, is that what you mean?""Not exactly, but you can put it that way if you like.
— Agatha Christie, The Man in the Brown Suit
Man is a clothed animal
—  almost.
If origin defines race, then we are all Africans – we are all black.
— Abhijit Naskar, We Are All Black: A Treatise on Racism
When our Paleolithic ancestors began making tools from stone over three million years ago, they had no understanding they were entering into one of the most successful symbiotic relationships this planet has ever seen. From those humble, preverbal beginnings, humans and technology have lifted one another, improved each other’s lot, made possible the most amazing partnership imaginable.
— Richard Yonck, Heart of the Machine: Our Future in a World of Artificial Emotional Intelligence
If you look at the evolution of the brain, the logic centers, they were growing at the same time as the creative centers were expanding. And that creates this really potent illusion that you’re not just a bag of chemicals reacting to shit. Which is what you are.
— Tim Cannon
Evolution is not humane, but we could be.
— William Olkowski
Emotions will be critical in making machine intelligence more compatible with our own. This will be essential in order to facilitate healthier interactions as we move forward into our hopefully shared future.
— Richard Yonck, Heart of the Machine: Our Future in a World of Artificial Emotional Intelligence
Evolution is the reverberation of God's creative voice.
— Atom Tate
Now I have two immediate objects in view. The first is to devote myself to the evolutionary life more thoroughly than I have yet done—to think, speak, do nothing but what is evolutionary. Hitherto I have been little more than a passive Evolutionist. Henceforth I shall be the active agent, the apostle of Evolution. I shall give Evolution ample opportunity to vindicate my fitness, and that as publicly as possible in order to convert others.
— John     Davidson, A Full and True Account of the Wonderful Mission of Earl Lavender, which Lasted One Night and One Day; with a History of the Pursuit of Earl Lavender and Lord Brumm by Mrs. Scamler and Maud Emblem
I’ll be hanged if I can understand how it concerns Evolution to get us out of a mere scrape.”“Out of all kinds of scrapes, my dear Brumm, Evolution has the power to deliver us. There is no conceivable scrape which is not a link in the great chain—in Chance, which is the empirical name for Evolution, and bears the same relation to it that alchemy bears to chemistry, and astrology to astronomy. And the last little scrape of all, death, is simply the charming means Evolution takes to get us out of the great big scrape, life. You will never be happy, my dear friend, until you submit to the Evolutionary will. If it were not so amusing, nothing would be more insufferable than the unanimity and persistency with which all men and kindreds and nations shout up into space, ‘What a scrape were in!’ It is the first thing the child says in its inarticulate way with the first breath of air it is able to employ. ‘Oh, what a scrape to be sure!’ And it is the last thing the man feels on his death-bed. And you will find that all the books and newspapers and music in the world are only expositions and sermons and fugues and variations on the one theme. ‘Oh, what a scrape!’ Now, it is my mission to change the world’s tune. I mean to teach it that scrape, luck, chance, is law, is Evolution, is the soul of the universe; and having brought man’s will into accord with the Evolutionary will, in a very short time it will come about that children will laugh with their first breath, as much as to say, ‘ What a delightful thing it is to come into the world.’ And on their death-beds men will cry, ‘How refreshing and noble it is to pass away,’ while all the books and newspapers and music of the world will cease to be a mere complaint, will cease—altogether, the books and newspapers, perhaps, and only glad music remain.
— John     Davidson, A Full and True Account of the Wonderful Mission of Earl Lavender, which Lasted One Night and One Day; with a History of the Pursuit of Earl Lavender and Lord Brumm by Mrs. Scamler and Maud Emblem
Watching our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees, is reading the first chapter of human-being’s adventures in this universe!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
A design can excel at one challenge only by compromising at others.
— Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works
If we are merely a chance product of ‘random happenstance’ and nothing more, doesn’t it strike you as a bit odd that we have the ability to contemplate the question of ‘random happenstance’ with such methodical complexity?
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
Having escaped the Dark Ages in which animals were mere stimulus-response machines, we are free to contemplate their mental lives. It is a great leap forward, the one that Griffin fought for. But now that animal cognition is an increasingly popular topic, we are still facing the mindset that animal cognition can be only a poor substitute of what we humans have. It can’t be truly deep and amazing. Toward the end of a long career, many a scholar cannot resist shining a light on human talents by listing all the things we are capable of and animals not. From the human perspective, these conjectures may make a satisfactory read, but for anyone interested, as I am, in the full spectrum of cognitions on our planet, they come across as a colossal waste of time. What a bizarre animal we are that the only question we can ask in relation to our place in nature is “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the smartest of them all?
— Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
All the explanations proposed seem to beonly partly satisfactory. They range from massive climatic change to mammalian predation to the extinction of a plant with apparent laxative properties, in which case the dinosaurs died of constipation.
— Carl Sagan, Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence