Evolution Quotes

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

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

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

So what do you want? asked Myrtle.I want to help evolution.Evolution did not fill Faith with the same horror her father had felt. Why should she weep to hear that nothing was set in stone? Everything could change. Everything could get better. Everything was getting better, inch by inch, so slowly that she could not see it, but knowing it gave her strength.

~ Frances Hardinge

The evolution begins at the moment when you decided to love yourself.

~ Corina Abdulahm-Negura

at least some paleontologists believe that the demiseof the dinosaurs was accelerated by nocturnal predation on reptilian eggs by the early mammals. Two chicken eggs for breakfast may be all-at least on the surface-that is left of this ancient mammalian cuisine.

~ Carl Sagan

So far as I know, childbirth is generally painful in only one of the millions of species on Earth: human beings. This must be a consequence of the recent and continuing increase in cranial volume... Childbirth is painful because the evolution of the human skull has been spectacularly fast and recent.

~ Carl Sagan

Pliny suggested that the ostrich, then newly discovered, was the result of a cross between a giraffe and a gnat. (It would, I suppose, have to be a female giraffe and a male gnat.) In practice there must be many such crosses which have not beenattempted because of a certain understandable lack of motivation.

~ Carl Sagan

It is very difficult to evolve by altering the deep fabric of life; any change there is likely to be lethal. But fundamental change can be accomplished by the addition of new systems on top of old ones…Thus evolution by addition and the functional preservation of the preexisting structure must occur for one of two reasons-either the old function is required as well as the new one, or there is no way of bypassing the old system that is consistent with survival.

~ Carl Sagan

The time scale for evolutionary or genetic change is very long. A characteristic period for the emergence of one advanced species from another is perhaps a hundred thousand years; and very often the difference in behavior between closely related species -say, lions and tigers- do not seem very great... But today we do not have ten million years to wait for the next advance. We live in a time when our world is changing at an unprecedented rate. While the changes are largely of our own making, they cannot be ignored. We must adjust and adapt and control, or we perish.

~ Carl Sagan

Our probable ancestors, Homo erectus and Homo habilis -now extinct- are classified as of the same genus (Homo) but of different species, although no one (at least lately) has attempted the appropriate experiments to see if crosses of them with us would produce fertile offspring.

~ Carl Sagan

Curiosity and the urge to solve problems are theemotional hallmarks of our species

~ Carl Sagan

For their surface area, insects weigh very little. A beetle, falling from a high altitude, quickly achieves terminal velocity: air resistance prevents it from falling very fast, and, after alighting on the ground, it will walk away, apparently none the worse for the experience… In contrast, human beings are characteristically maimed or killed by any fall of more than a few dozen feet: because of our size, we weigh too much for our surface area.

~ Carl Sagan

And despite the insignificance of the instant we have so far occupied in cosmic time, it is clear that what happens on and near Earth at the beginning of thesecond cosmic year will depend very much on the scientific wisdom and the distinctly human sensitivity of mankind.

~ Carl Sagan

The sleeping style of each organism is exquisitelyadapted to the ecology of the animal. It is conceivable that animals who are too stupid to be quiet on their own initiative are, during periods of high risk, immobilized by the implacable arm of sleep.

~ Carl Sagan

The erotic drive is the great energy that moves through all evolution.What about love? Where does that fit in?Love's simply the handmaiden of the great energy, and an excuse to write suspect poetry.

~ Peter Milligan

Washburn has reported that infant baboons and other young primates appear to be born with only three inborn fears -of falling, snakes, and the dark-corresponding respectively to the dangers posed byNewtonian gravitation to tree-dwellers, by our ancient enemies the reptiles, and by mammalian nocturnal predators, which must have been particularly terrifying for the visually oriented primates.

~ Carl Sagan

If we were fossils of two snails caught in a rock for millions of years.Would we know we were together?

~ Natasha Tsakos

Certain barriers do require a critical mass of action at the right time to overcome the inertia that is greater than incremental change.

~ David Jaber

Neither humans nor the Gods that they have created are superior to old Mother Nature.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Tis from the resemblance of the external actions of animals to those we ourselves perform, that we judge their internal likewise to resemble ours; and the same principle of reasoning, carry'd one step further, will make us conclude that since our internal actions resemble each other, the causes, from which they are deriv'd, must also be resembling. When any hypothesis, therefore, is advanc'd to explain a mental operation, which is common to men and beasts, we must apply the same hypothesis to both.

~ David Hume

The shrimp's protein and ours are not exactly the same, but they're sosimilar that if you turned up in court and tried to convince a judge that yourversion was not a badly concealed plagiarism, you'd be very unlikely to win.In fact, you'd be a laughing stock, for rhodopsin is not restricted to vent shrimpand humans but is omnipresent throughout the animal kingdom.... Trying to persuade a judge that your rhodopsin is not plagiarisedwould be like trying to clajm that your television set is fundamentally differentfrom everyone else's, just because it's bigger or has a flat screen.

~ Nick Lane

Good and evil are both within us. And when our primitive ancestors humanized these natural qualities of the mind, they got two completely opposite supernatural characters. One was the merciful lord almighty and the other was the wicked devil.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Their necks also beautifully demonstrate the jury-rigged nature of evolution while simultaneously refuting the notion that some divine Artificer intelligently designed organic life

~ Brian Switek

And evolution wasn't even properly invented until the late 1800s. Is that enough time to get a Labrador retriever from a dire wolf? I think not.

~ Bobby Henderson

The currency of evolution is neither hunger nor pain, but rather copies of DNA helixes

~ Yuval Noah Harari

We humans are the gods of this planet. And we also have created Superior Gods than us, to have a sense of security.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Somatic hypermutation gives rise to B cells bearing mutant immunoglobulin molecules on their surface. Some of these mutant immunoglobulins have substitutions in the antigen-binding site that increase its affinity for the antigen. B cells bearing these mutant high-affinity immunoglobulin receptors compete most effectively for binding to antigen and are preferentially selected to mature into antibody-secreting plasma cells. The mutant antibodies that emerge from the selection do not have a random distribution of amino-acid substitutions. The changes are concentrated at positions in the heavy-chain and light-chain CDR loops that form the antigen-binding site and directly contact antigen. As the adaptive immune response to infection proceeds, antibodies of progressively higher affinity for the infecting pathogen are produced – a phenomenon called affinity maturation. Affinity maturation is a process of evolution in which variant immunoglobulins generated in a random manner are subjected to selection for improved binding to a pathogen. It achieves in a few days what would require thousands, if not millions, of years of classical Darwinian evolution in a conventional gene. This capacity for extraordinarily rapid evolution in pathogen-binding immunoglobulins is a major factor in allowing the human immune system to keep up with the generally faster-evolving pathogens.

~ Peter Parham

Lastly I’d say this – true religion, as a part of Neuroscience – a study of the mind – is the greatest and healthiest exercise that the human mind has. In some form or other, it is an evolutionary necessity of the human mind, not a luxury.

~ Abhijit Naskar

But if the ants are not despondent because they have failed to produce a new social invention or convention in 65 million years, why should we be discouraged because some of our institutions and castes have not been able to evolve a new idea in the past fifty centuries?

~ William Morton Wheeler

Evolutionarily speaking, love is all about procreation.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Ignorance and weakness is not an impediment to survival. Arrogance is.

~ Cixin Liu

If the Earth were not subject to any change I would consider the Earth a big but useless body in universe, paralyzed...superfluous and unnatural.Those who so exalt incorruptibility, unchangeability and the like, are, I think, reduced to saying such things both because of inordinate desire they have to live for a long time and because of the terror they have of death...they do not realize that if men were immortal, they would have never come into the world.

~ Galileo Galilei

You will always have doubts, but only discover them at a useful time for your weakness to point them out.

~ Idries Shah

When we change and grow into new versions of ourselves, we have to tolerate a lot of uncertainty.

~ Nancy Levin

If then the question is put to me whether I would rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means of influence and yet employs these faculties and that influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion, I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.

~ Thomas Henry Huxley

When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled.

~ Charles Darwin

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

~ Charles Darwin