Quotes About Species

Sharks have swum the oceans for over 400 million years, but we're threatening this critically important species for the purpose of making soup - it's sad and wasteful.

Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.

As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.

What nature does in the course of long periods we do every day when we suddenly change the environment in which some species of living plant is situated.

We admit as many genera as there are different groups of natural species of which the fructification has the same structure.

ADDER, n. A species of snake. So called from its habit of adding funeral outlays to the other expenses of living.

It is not always the magnitude of the differences observed between species that must determine specific distinctions, but the constant preservation of those differences in reproduction.

The insanity of the collective egoic mind, amplified by science and technology, is rapidly taking our species to the brink of disaster. Evolve or die: that is our only choice now.

Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection determined the evolution of cultures in the same manner as it did that of species.

We will now discuss in a little more detail the Struggle for Existence.

Generation by male and female is a law common to animals and plants.

Tho' there be no such Thing as Chance in the World; our Ignorance of the real Ccause of any Event has the same Influence on the Understanding, and begets a like Species of Belief or Opinion.

When I began in 1960, individuality wasn't an accepted thing to look for; it was about species-specific behaviour. But animal behaviour is not hard science. There's room for intuition.

The price for being intelligent enough to be the first species to be fully aware of the cosmos might just be a capacity to feel a whole universe's worth of darkness.

Maybe they seeded life on Earth millions of years ago, and now they're here to punish us for turning out to be such a lame species and inventing reality TV and shit?

No existing form of anthropoid ape is even remotely related to the stock which has given rise to man.

We may smile and the dog may wag the tail, but in essence, we have a set program and those programs are similar across individuals in the species.

The fidelity question is difficult for me. Society has made us believe we're supposed to be monogamous when we're not killer whales, or whatever the monogamous species is.

I feel only gratitude. We are doing something as necessary to our well-being as food or air or water. We are steeping ourselves, reassuring ourselves, renewing ourselves, three creatures of two species, finding comfort in the simple exchange of body warmth.

You know what they say. The living are only a species of the dead, aren't they? And a very rare species at that. The cradle rocks over the abyss.

The comparative isolation of any island can result in what Oliver Sacks calls geographic singularity, a kind of separateness that allows not only for the evolution of animal and plant species that can be found nowhere else, but also for systems of thinking and belief that develop with limited external influence and intrusions; islands cultivate what is unique on this earth.

the news should help us with mourning the twisted nature of man and reconciling us to the difficulty of being able to imagine perfection while still not managing to secure it – for a range of stupid but nevertheless unbudgeable reasons...The news currently resists giving us the single most calming response one can offer to certain problems: evidence that they are normal and that they belong to a species which is intrinsically (rather than exceptionally) imperfect.

It seems as if, in making a marriage, either the individual or the interest of the species must come off badly.

By conceiving of love as biologically inevitable, key to the continuation of the species, Schopenhauer's theory of the will invites us to adopt a more forgiving stance towards the eccentric behaviour to which love so often makes us subject.