Quotes About Diversity

Almost seventy years ago the Cuban folklorist Fernando Ortiz Fernández coined the awkward but useful term "transculturation" to describe what happens when one group of people takes something—a song, a food, an ideal—from another. Almost inevitably, Ortiz noted, the new thing is transformed; people make it their own by adapting, stripping, and twisting it to fit their needs and situation.

In a letter to Thomas Jefferson, the aging John Adams recalled the Massachusetts of his youth as a multiracial society. "Aaron Pomham the Priest and Moses Pomham the Kind of the Punkapaug and Neponsit Tribes were frequent Visitors at my Father's House Ã¢â'¬Â¦," he wrote nostalgically.

The Columbian Exchange had such far-reaching effects that some biologists now say that Colón's voyages marked the beginning of a new biological era: the Homogenocene. The term refers to homogenizing: mixing unlike substances to create a uniform blend. With the Columbian Exchange, places that were once ecologically distinct have become more alike.

we begin to appreciate the enormity of the calamity, for the distintegration of native America was a loss not just to those societies but to the human enterprise as a whole. Having grown separately for millennia, the Americas were a boundless sea of novel ideas, dreams, stories, philosophies, religions, moralities, discoveries, and all the other products of the mind. Few things are more sublime or characteristically human than the cross-fertilization of cultures.

More than nine out of ten Native Americans—and almost all South American Indians—have type O blood, for example, whereas Europeans are more evenly split between types O and A.

Having grown separately for millennia, the [orginal] Americans were a boundless sea of novel ideas, drea,s, stories, philosophies, religions, ,oralities, discoveries, and all other products of the mind....Here and there we see clues of what might have been. Pacific Northwest Indian artists carved beautiful masks, boxes, bas-relief S, and totem poles within the dictates of an elaborate aesthetic syste, based on an ovoid shapes that has no name in European languages.

Most modern forms of plant and animal appeared in a spasm of evolutionary creativity that began about 550 million years ago.

Seventeenth-century West Africa was even more politically fragmented than Europe. A map prepared by Thornton shows more than sixty different states of wildly varying size.

Rather than the thick, unbroken, monumental snarl of trees imagined by Thoreau, the great eastern forest was an ecological kaleidoscope of garden plots, blackberry rambles, pine barrens, and spacious groves of chestnut, hickory, and oak. The first Europeans in Ohio found woodlands that resembled English parks—they could drive carriages through the trees.

More than a hundred sets of casta paintings are known. Many are beautifully crafted. Some were painted by mixed people themselves. Looking

I think it's very important to live a varied and interesting life before you try to write one.

Natural Selection almost inevitably causes much Extinction of the less improved forms of life and induces what I have called Divergence of Character.

One hand has surely worked throughout the universe.

I do not believe, as we shall presently see, that all our dogs have descended from any one wild species; but, in the case of some other domestic races, there is presumptive, or even strong, evidence in favour of this view.

I have stated, that in the thirteen species of ground-finches, a nearly perfect gradation may be traced, from a beak extraordinarily thick, to one so fine, that it may be compared to that of a warbler.

The great variability of all the external differences between the races of man, likewise indicates that they cannot be of much importance; for if important, they would long ago have been either fixed and preserved, or eliminated.

la variabilidad se relaciona generalmente con las condiciones de vida a las que cada especie ha estado expuesta durante varias generaciones sucesivas.

Hence if man goes on selecting, and thus augmenting, any peculiarity, he will almost certainly modify unintentionally other parts of the structure, owing to the mysterious laws of correlation.

In regard to the amount of difference between the races, we must make some allowance for our nice powers of discrimination gained by a long habit of observing ourselves.

Let it also be borne in mind how infinitely complex and close-fitting are the mutual relations of all organic beings to each other and to their physical conditions of life; and consequently what infinitely varied diversities of structure might be of use to each being under changing conditions of life.

For forms existing in larger numbers will always have a better chance, within any given period, of presenting further favourable variations for natural selection to seize on, than will the rarer forms which exist in lesser numbers.

And thus, the forms of life throughout the universe become divided into groups subordinate to groups.

He who believes that each being has been created as we now see it, must occasionally have felt surprise when he has met with an animal having habits and structure not at all in agreement.

Showing that they descend from common parents, and consequently must be ranked as varieties.