Quotes About Species

One weedy species," the pair observed, "has unwittingly achieved the ability to directly affect its own fate and that of most of the other species on this planet.

stored inside of them, in frigid clouds of nitrogen, are cell lines representing nearly a thousand species.

Darwin's familiarity with human-caused extinction is also clear from On the Origin of Species. In one of the many passages in which he heaps scorn on the catastrophists, he observes that animals inevitably become rare before they become extinct: "we know this has been the progress of events with those animals which have been exterminated, either locally or wholly, through man's agency.

Somewhere in our DNA must lie the key mutation (or, more probably, mutations) that set us apart—the mutations that make us the sort of creature that could wipe out its nearest relative, then dig up its bones and reassemble its genome.

One of the defining features of the Anthropocene is that the world is changing in ways that compel species to move, and another is that it's changing in ways that create barriers—roads, clear-cuts, cities—that prevent them from doing so.

The current extinction has its own novel cause: not an asteroid or a massive volcanic eruption but "one weedy species.

By transporting Asian species to North America, and North American species to Australia, and Australian species to Africa, and European species to Antarctica, we are, in effect, reassembling the world into one enormous supercontinent—what biologists sometimes refer to as the New Pangaea.

The anthropologist Richard Leakey has warned that "Homo sapiens might not only be the agent of the sixth extinction, but also risks being one of its victims." A sign in the Hall of Biodiversity offers a quote from the Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich: IN PUSHING OTHER SPECIES TO EXTINCTION, HUMANITY IS BUSY SAWING OFF THE LIMB ON WHICH IT PERCHES.

One of the many unintended consequences of the Anthropocene has been the pruning of our own family tree. Having cut down our sister species—the Neanderthals and the Denisovans—many generations ago, we're now working on our first and second cousins. By the time we're done, it's quite possible that there will be among the great apes not a single representative left, except, that is, for us.

If warming were held to a minimum, the team estimated that between 22 and 31 percent of the species would be "committed to extinction" by 2050. If warming were to reach what was at that point considered a likely maximum—a figure that now looks too low—by the middle of this century, between 38 and 52 percent of the species would be fated to disappear.

Darwin's theory about how species originated doubled as a theory of how they vanished. Extinction and evolution were to each other the warp and weft of life's fabric, or, if you prefer, two sides of the same coin. "The appearance of new forms and the disappearance of old forms" were, Darwin wrote, "bound together." Driving both was the "struggle for existence," which rewarded the fit and eliminated the less so.

The needs of children of married parents & children of divorced parents are the same. They are the same species. So why are children of divorce considered so resilient? Because the adults need them to be that way.

I saw that animals were important. I saw that plants were even more important. I was also to learn that compared to many of the other species, we weren't important at all except for the damage we do. We do not rule the natural world, despite our conspicuous position in it. On the contrary, it is our lifeline, and we do well to try to understand its rules.

The disastrous history of our species indicates the futility of all attempts at a diagnosis which do not take into account the possibility that homo sapiens is a victim of one of evolution's countless mistakes.

As members of the same species, human beings broadly share notions and precepts of morality, of what is socially regarded as a proper conduct. But again, there is no reason to think that these notions and precepts should fully converge and cohere between different people and different communities, or even in the minds of the individuals themselves.

The adoption of conceptual frames and grids put together by the collective efforts of others is the ingenious shortcut to knowledge that our species has carried far beyond anything known among other animals. The human world of ideas is a product of a division of intellectual labor over extended periods, whose fruits are socially shared and cumulative.

We're losing biodiversity globally at an alarming rate, and we need a cornucopia of different plants and animals, for the planet's health and our own.

That's a real problem when people bring exotics into their homes. Sometimes it's by accident, but sometimes it's on purpose.

Under natural selection, species adapt to their environments. When the environment refers to a species' physical habitat, this seems simple enough. If a species lives in the Arctic, it had better evolve some warm fur. Under sexual selection, species adapt too, but they adapt to themselves. Females adapt to males, and males adapt to females. Sexual preferences adapt to the sexual ornaments avaliable, and sexual ornaments adapt to sexual preferences.

If it's true that our species is alone in the universe, then I'd have to say the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little.

I am a personal optimist but a skeptic about all else. What may sound to some like anger is really nothing more than sympathetic contempt. I view my species with a combination of wonder and pity, and I root for its destruction. And please don't confuse my point of view with cynicism; the real cynics are the ones who tell you everything's gonna be all right.

Abraham Maslow said that the fully realized person transcends his local group and identifies with the species. But the election of Ronald Reagan might've been the beginning of my giving up on my species. Because it was absurd. To this day it remains absurd. More than absurd, it was frightening: it represented the rise to supremacy of darkness, the ascendancy of ignorance.

As a species, we've somehow survived large and small ice ages, genetic bottlenecks, plagues, world wars and all manner of natural disasters, but I sometimes wonder if we'll survive our own ingenuity.

In treating of the oak, I have considered that the species of it growing in warm climates is superior to that which is produced in cold countries. But we must not imagine this to be the case with all woods; on the contrary, the fir timber grown in cold countries is superior to that produced in warm ones, where its growth is rapid.