Quotes About Species

MAN OCCUPIES A PECULIAR position in the animal kingdom.1Unlike the other higher mammals, he has no species-specific environment,2 no environment firmly structured by his own instinctual organization.

Humans are uniquely good throwers. No other species even comes close. Monkeys and apes can throw branches, rotten fruit, and excrement (I still remember an encounter with an irate troop of howler monkeys in Costa Rica . . .), but they do not use projectiles as lethal weapons in hunting or combat. Our closest relatives, chimpanzees, are quite pathetic at throwing.94 Imagine

four Fs" of evolutionary survival: Fleeing, Fighting, Feeding and Fucking. If any one of these instincts malfunctions in a species, the species will eventually become extinct.

It can be argued that the current rise of serial killers can be perhaps attributed to a new evolutionary prerogative for the demise of our species; Mother Nature's little way of saying, in among several other ways, that there might be too many humans on the planet.)

Life evolves. Parasites evolve. Sex evolves to counter the parasites. Shuffles the genes so the parasites have to shoot for a moving target. Everything else—species diversity, density-dependence, everything—it all follows from those three laws. You get a self-replicating string past a certain threshold, it's like a nuclear reaction.

Fundamentalists who demand that their creation myths be inserted into science classes tend to look at you funny when you suggest that likewise, we could insert passages from On the Origin of Species into the book of Genesis.

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing—irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness. By now you don't experience the world as it exists at all. You experience a simulation built from assumptions. Shortcuts. Lies. Whole species is agnosiac by default. Rorschach does nothing to you that you don't already do to yourselves.

A chance to glimpse the traces of an alien intelligence—whatever alien meant in a world where members of his own species stitched themselves together into colony minds, or summoned their own worst nightmares back from the Pleistocene to run the stock market.

conspecifics

SPECIES USED TO GO EXTINCT. NOW THEY GO ON HIATUS. —Deborah MacLennan, Tables of our Reconstruction

alien meant in a world where members of his own species stitched themselves together into colony minds, or summoned their own worst nightmares back from the Pleistocene to run the stock market.

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing—irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness. By now you don't experience the world as it exists at all. You experience a simulation built from assumptions. Shortcuts. Lies. Whole species is agnosiac by default.

Fra Leo e Thomas è ormai sorta, e incomincia a crescere di minuto in minuto, una energia che trae forza solo da sé stessa, da quei contatti fintamente causali, da quegli sfioramenti leggeri, da quegli sguardi muti. Non si sono ancora parlati. Le parole non sono contemplate in questo momento per entrambi primordiale, arcaico, in cui la vita chiama la vita attraverso la più profonda energia della specie.

If you want something beautiful to put on the dinner table, pick up a sockeye, the salmon species with the most vivid red flesh.

We are a profoundly interconnected species, as the global economic and ecological crises reveal in vivid and frightening detail. We must embrace the simple fact that we are dependent on and accountable to one another.

I suppose that few people ever forget the first sight of a palm-tree of any species. I vividly remember seeing one for the first time at Malaga, but the coco-palm groves of the Pacific have a strangeness and witchery of their own.

We're a miserably violent species. But there's a complication, which is we don't hate violence, we hate the wrong kind. And when it's the right kind, we cheer it on, we hand out medals, we vote for, we mate with our champions of it. When it's the right kind of violence, we love it.

The New Regime even recycled the old Republic's buzzwords, collective, collaborative. Axiomatic to both was that a new species of humanity was emerging.

And yet there's other species even closer to zero. I know that. And I hope to God somebody else is worrying about 'em. I often ask myself, would I slit my own throat if I was guaranteed I could save one species by slitting it? We all know one human life is worth more than one bird's life. But is my miserable little life worth a whole species?

Species don't make choices, individuals do. And even if species somehow could, to imply that they would select perpetuity over individual well-being is hard to apply more broadly. By this logic, enslaving a group of humans is acceptable if the posed alternative were nonexistence. (Instead of Live free or die, the motto we script for our food animals is Die enslaved but live.)

And when I began to consider that, by copulating with one of the Yahoo species I had become a parent of more, it struck me with the utmost shame, confusion, and horror.

Peter suspects that the caltrop is evolving in response to the finches. Where the struggle for existence is fierce, the caltrop that is likeliest to succeed is the plant that puts more energy into spines and less into seeds; but in the safer, more secluded spot, the fittest plants are the ones that put more energy into making seeds and less energy into protecting them. The finches may be driving the evolution of caltrop while caltrop is driving the evolution of the finches.

In fact, I think they should be called Lack's finches and not Darwin's. Darwin didn't see the significance of the birds. He thought there was just one species per island. He didn't even try to pull it together - he didn't do a bloody thing with them except collect them.

Behavior is the product of forces, contending forces that are still contending today, struggling within each generation. The borders between species are continually tested and redefined by the outcome of each member of each generation's luck in love - an amazing thought. (p.170)