Quotes About Development

Americans] were, for one thing, so smitten with the idea of progress that they invented things without having any idea whether those things would be of any use.

I wondered idly what the builders of Stonehenge would have created if they'd had bulldozers and big trucks for moving materials and computers to help them design. What would they have created if they had had all the tools we have? Then I crested the brow of the hill with a view down to the visitor center, with its café and gift shop, its land trains and giant parking lot, and realized I was almost certainly looking at it.

The brain takes a long time to form completely. A teenager's brain is only about 80 percent finished (which may not come as a great surprise to the parents of teenagers

We are so used to having a lot of comfort in our lives—to being clean, warm, and well fed—that we forget how recent most of that is. In fact, achieving these things took forever, and then they mostly came in a rush.

Perhaps it would be an idea to require developers to live on their own estates for five years, as a demonstration of their superb liveability. It's just a thought. I

I am quite certain that if the rest of the world vanished overnight and the development of cricket was left in Australian hands, within a generation the players would be wearing shorts and using the bats to hit each other.

pharmaceutical industry hasn't given us an entirely new antibiotic since the 1970s. Our

In fact, mostly what the Forest Service does is build roads.

It is a natural human impulse to think of evolution as a long chain of improvements, of a never-ending advance towards largeness and complexity – in a word, towards us. We flatter ourselves. Most of the real diversity in evolution has been small-scale. We large things are just flukes – an interesting side branch.

Life emerged so swiftly, in fact, that some authorities think it must have had help—perhaps a good deal of help.

For 2 billion years this is all the life there was on earth, but in that time the stromatolites raised the oxygen level in the atmosphere to 20 percent—enough to allow the development of other, more complex life-forms: me, for instance. My gratitude was real.

It is mildly disconcerting to reflect that the whole of meaningful human history—the development of farming, the creation of towns, the rise of mathematics and writing and science and all the rest—has taken place within an atypical patch of fair weather.

H. L. Mencken called it "the one authentic rectum of civilization," but for most people Hollywood was a place of magic. In 1927, the iconic sign on the hillside above the city actually said HOLLYWOODLAND. It had been erected in 1923 to advertise a real estate development and had nothing to do with motion pictures. The letters, each over forty feet high, were in those days also traced out with electric lights. (The LAND was removed in 1949.)

Behaviorally modern human beings—that is, people who can speak and make art and organize complex activities—have existed for only about 0.0001 percent of Earth's history

Without the Moon's steadying influence, the Earth would wobble like a dying top, with goodness knows what consequences for climate and weather. The Moon's steady gravitational influence keeps the Earth spinning at the right speed and angle to provide the sort of stability necessary for the long and successful development of life.

A child half your height who falls and strikes her head will experience only 1/32 of the force of impact that a grown person would feel, which is part of the reason that children so often seem to be mercifully indestructible.15

It would be hard to believe that the continuous movement of tectonic plates has no effect on the development of life on earth.

The brain takes a long time to form completely. A teenager's brain is only about 80 percent finished

To get from "protoplasmal primordial atomic globule" (as Gilbert and Sullivan put it) to sentient upright modern human has required you to mutate new traits over and over in a precisely timely manner for an exceedingly long while.

The tiniest deviation from any of these evolutionary imperatives and you might now be licking algae from cave walls or lolling walrus-like on some stony shore or disgorging air through a blowhole in the top of your head before diving sixty feet for a mouthful of delicious sandworms. Not

They believed that any boy treated with decency, encouragement, and respect would grow into a model citizen, and they were nearly always right. Ninety-five percent of Xaverian boys went on to live normal, stable lives.

For almost four billion years life had dawdled along without any detectable ambitions in the direction of complexity, and then suddenly, in the space of just five or ten million years, it had created all the basic body designs still in use today.

They are, reluctantly or enthusiastically, accepting the idea that humans are as much an accident of nature as a product of orderly development." But

One reason life took so long to grow complex was that the world had to wait until the simpler organisms had oxygenated the atmosphere sufficiently