Quotes About Origin

There is absolutely no reason to believe that those things for which science does not yet have natural explanations will turn out to be of supernatural origin, any more than volcanoes or earthquakes or diseases turn out to be caused by angry deities, as people once believed they were. Of

The genetic code is universal. I regard this as near-conclusive proof that all organisms are descended from a single common ancestor.

How did ears get their start? Any piece of skin can detect vibrations if they come in contact with vibrating objects. This is a natural outgrowth of the sense of touch. Natural selection could easily have enhanced this faculty by gradual degrees until it was sensitive enough to pick up very slight contact vibrations. At this point it would automatically have been sensitive enough to pick up airborne vibrations of sufficient loudness and/or sufficient nearness of origin

Why did sex, that bizarre perversion of straightforward replication, ever arise in the first place? What is the good of sex?* This is an extremely difficult question for the evolutionist to answer.

If the odds of life originating spontaneously on a planet were a billion to one against, nevertheless that stupefyingly improbable event would still happen on a billion planets.

And the beauty of the anthropic principle is that it tells us, against all intuition, that a chemical model need only predict that life will arise on one planet in a billion billion to give us a good and entirely satisfying explanation for the presence of life here. I do not for a moment believe the origin of life was anywhere near so improbable in practice.

We can deal with the unique origin of life by postulating a very large number of planetary opportunities. Once that initial stroke of luck has been granted – and the anthropic principle most decisively grants it to us – natural selection takes over: and natural selection is emphatically not a matter of luck.

It comes from natural selection: the process which, as far as we know, is the only process ultimately capable of generating complexity out of simplicity.

They named me Kristin after some whale scientist in Australia, worked on the original translation team.

who knows how the data behind these metaphors has traveled, from where and for how long.

Tell me, do you get the ape in you from your mother's or your father's side of the family? - Cat

For if consciousness is based on language, then it follows that it is of a much more recent origin than has heretofore been supposed. Consciousness come after language! The implications of such a position are extremely serious.

The ancients had believed that nothing came from nothing, but Heidegger reversed this maxim: ex nihilo omne qua ens fit. He ended his lecture by posing a question asked by Leibniz: "Why are there beings at all, rather than just nothing?

Rudolf Otto, the German historian of religion who published his important book The Idea of the Holy in 1917, believed that this sense of the "numinous" was basic to religion. It preceded any desire to explain the origin of the world or find a basis for ethical behavior.

Disputes that were secular in origin, such as the Arab-Israeli conflict, have been allowed to fester and become "holy," and once they have been sacralized, positions tend to harden and become resistant to pragmatic solutions.

If they were to go away from their land, they must have people round them who had known it, and so could testify to their identity.

Where you fro, miss?

Moon was from somewhere up east, the kind of place where consonants took on a life of their own.

Nothing can emerge at the end of the process which did not appear as a presupposition and precondition at the beginning.

The last place he intended to end up in was the place he had started from, the place where his entire family lay restlessly in the earth.

The wise man of Miletus thus declared the first of things is water

Upon the great questions of origin, of destiny, of immortality, of . . . other worlds, every honest man must say, 'I do not know.' Upon these questions, this is the creed of intelligence.

Man may be considered as having a twofold origin - natural, which is common and the same to all - patronymic, which belongs to the various families of which the whole human race is composed.

If man evolved from monkeys and apes, why do we still have monkeys and apes?