Quotes About Humanity

the crisis Cuvier discerned just beyond the edge of recorded history was us.

Right now we are in the midst of the Sixth Extinction, this time caused solely by humanity's transformation of the ecological landscape.

Wilson has observed, "We are not as gods. We're not yet sentient or intelligent enough to be much of anything." Paul Kingsnorth, a British writer and activist, has put it this way: "we are as gods, but we have failed to get good at it.. We are Loki, killing the beautiful for fun. We are Saturn, devouring our children... Sometimes doing nothing is better than doing something.

is "the denial of humanity's special status.

ICH BIN STOLZ, EIN NEANDERTHALER ZU SEIN

The Sixth Extinction will continue to determine the course of life long after everything people have written and painted and built has been ground into dust and giant rats have -or have not- inherited the earth.

The anthropologist Richard Leakey has warned that "Homo sapiens might not only be the agent of the sixth extinction, but also risks being one of its victims.

This is the case even though a hundred million years from now, all that we consider to be the great works of man—the sculptures and the libraries, the monuments and the museums, the cities and the factories—will be compressed into a layer of sediment not much thicker than a cigarette paper.

There is every reason to believe that if humans had not arrived on the scene, the Neanderthals would be there still, along with the wild horses and the woolly rhinos. With the capacity to represent the world in signs and symbols comes the capacity to change it, which, as it happens, is also the capacity to destroy it. A tiny set of genetic variations divides us from the Neanderthals, but that has made all the difference.

Beginnings, it's said, are apt to be shadowy. So it is with this story, which starts with the emergence of a new species maybe two hundred thousand years ago.

los neandertales siguieron el destino del Megatherium, el mastodonte americano, y de tantos otros desafortunados miembros de la megafauna. En otras palabras, tal como me lo expresó un investigador, «su mala suerte fuimos nosotros».

Paul Ehrlich: IN PUSHING OTHER SPECIES TO EXTINCTION, HUMANITY IS BUSY SAWING OFF THE LIMB ON WHICH IT PERCHES.

If there is danger in the human trajectory, it is not so much in the survival of our own species as in the fulfillment of the ultimate irony of organic evolution: that in the instant of achieving self-understanding through the mind of man, life has doomed its most beautiful creations. —E. O. WILSON

Beginnings, it's said, are apt to be shadowy. So it is with this story, which starts with the emergence of a new species maybe two hundred thousand years ago. The species does not yet have a name—nothing

If you want to think about why humans are so dangerous to other species, you can picture a poacher in Africa carrying an AK-47 or a logger in the Amazon gripping an ax, or, better still, you can picture yourself, holding a book in your lap.

all non-Africans, from the New Guineans to the French to the Han Chinese, carry somewhere between one and four percent Neanderthal DNA.

IN PUSHING OTHER SPECIES TO EXTINCTION, HUMANITY IS BUSY SAWING OFF THE LIMB ON WHICH IT PERCHES.

If you want to think about why humans are so dangerous to other species, you can picture a poacher in Africa carrying an AK-47 or a logger in the Amazon gripping an ax, or, better still, you can picture yourself, holding a book on your lap.

Responding to Brand, Wilson has observed, "We are not as gods. We're not yet sentient or intelligent enough to be much of anything" Paul Kingsnorth, a British writer and activist, has put it this way: "We are as gods, but we have failed to get good at it... We are Loki, killing the beautiful for fun. We are Saturn, devouring our children.

A sign in the Hall of Biodiversity offers a quote from the Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich: IN PUSHING OTHER SPECIES TO EXTINCTION, HUMANITY IS BUSY SAWING OFF THE LIMB ON WHICH IT PERCHES.

Somewhere in our DNA must lie the key mutation (or, more probably, mutations) that set us apart—the mutations that make us the sort of creature that could wipe out its nearest relative, then dig up its bones and reassemble its genome.

The anthropologist Richard Leakey has warned that "Homo sapiens might not only be the agent of the sixth extinction, but also risks being one of its victims." A sign in the Hall of Biodiversity offers a quote from the Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich: IN PUSHING OTHER SPECIES TO EXTINCTION, HUMANITY IS BUSY SAWING OFF THE LIMB ON WHICH IT PERCHES.

with the exception of humans, all the great apes today are facing oblivion.

Even now, at least thirty thousand years after the fact, the signal is discernible: all non-Africans, from the New Guineans to the French to the Han Chinese, carry somewhere between one and four percent Neanderthal DNA.