Quotes About Extinction

It's easy to think that as a result of the extinction of the dodo we are now sadder and wiser, but there's a lot of evidence to suggest that we are merely sadder and better informed.

The modern world is devoted to vanishing species, vanishing weather and vanishing capacity for wonder.

Global warming, along with the cutting and burning of forests and other critical habitats, is causing the loss of living species at a level comparable to the extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. That event was believed to have been caused by a giant asteroid. This time it is not an asteroid colliding with the Earth and wreaking havoc: it is us.

La adaptabilidad es la clave del más apto, y la extinción de una especie representa la evolución de otra.

It was not that intelligent life was rare, it seemed, but that intelligent life was very, very prone to becoming extinct. Almost as if something was deliberately wiping it out. The wolves were the missing element in the puzzle, the agency responsible for the extinctions. Implacable, infinitely patient machines, they homed in on the signs of intelligence and enacted a terrible, crushing penalty. Hence, a lonely, silent galaxy, patrolled only by watchful machine sentries.

An asteroid or a supervolcano could certainly destroy us, but we also face risks the dinosaurs never saw: An engineered virus, nuclear war, inadvertent creation of a micro black hole, or some as-yet-unknown technology could spell the end of us.

Global climate change has become entangled with the problem of invasive species. A warmer climate could allow some invaders to spread farther, while causing native organisms to go extinct in their traditional habitats and making room for invaders.

Polar bears did very well in the warmer times. They didn't die out at all; they didn't die out in the last 10,000 years, nor during the previous interglacial, nor the one before that. So, they're just used as a deceitful heartthrob; you know, to pluck your heartstrings because the polar bears might die out.

Shouldn't the cascades of extinction and rapid planetary warming register in our literature?

Species are going extinct because of habitat loss and warming. I feel deeply responsible and think about it every day.

It has actually been suggested that warfare may have been the principle evolutionary pressure that created the huge gap between the human brain and that of our closest living relatives, the anthropoid apes. Whole groups of hominids with inferior brains could not win wars and were therefore exterminated.

And no one was left to walk behind that coffin but three old women who quietly, timidly, beneath the black veils covering their transitory old faces, mourned the end of a lineage and the inevitability of extinction.

But without people, the village dog and pampered pet alike would soon disappear—dogs would become extinct.

We are uneasily aware that a similar catastrophe[, that of an immense meteorite or comet hitting the earth and causing massive global extinction,] could hit us at any moment... [T]he odds that it will happen in some unfortunate individual's lifetime are near certainty... And the unfortunate individuals concerned will probably not be human, for statistical likelihood is that we shall be extinct before that anyway.

a group, such as a species or a population within a species, whose individual members are prepared to sacrifice themselves for the welfare of the group, may be less likely to go extinct than a rival group whose individual members place their own selfish interests first. Therefore the world becomes populated mainly by groups consisting of self-sacrificing individuals. This is the theory of 'group selection'

Only sometimes you can't feel anything about a subject without hypothesizing its extinction.

Basically, she argues that the Secession was an example of a nation-state going extinct because it failed to adapt. America couldn't cope with modernity, it died from the shock and was torn apart by more adaptive entities. Though I think she tends to skate around the edge of what America really died of." "Which is what?" Yavuz shrugged. "Fear.

And then there is the inevitable third stylisation—of posthumous memory. Leading to the moment when the last living person to remember you has their very last thought about you. There ought to be a name for that final event, which marks your final extinction.

Over the years of the Cultural Revolution, I was to witness people being attacked for saying thank you too often, which was branded as bourgeois hypocrisy; courtesy was on the brink of extinction.

But listen, devils never drive humanity to extinction. Why? Because if people cease to exist, so do devils.

We are meaning-seeking creatures and, unlike other animals, fall very easily into despair if we fail to make sense of our lives. We find the prospect of our inevitable extinction hard to bear. We are troubled by natural disasters and human cruelty and are acutely aware of our

A classe média baixa, o pequeno fabricante, o lojista, o artesão, o camponês, todos lutam contra a burguesia para salvar da extinção sua existência como frações da classe média. Eles não são, portanto, revolucionários, mas conservadores.

Let's not be too quick to blame the human race for everything. A great many species of animals became extinct before man ever appeared on earth.

Our planet is currently undergoing a mass extinction of species called the Anthropocene - the Age of Man.