Quotes About Species

I would like to speculate a little on the development of life in the universe, and in particular on the development of intelligent life. I shall take this to include the human race, even though much of its behaviour throughout history has been pretty stupid and not calculated to aid the survival of the species. Two questions I shall discuss are "What is the probability of life existing elsewhere in the universe?" and "How may life develop in the future?

global warming, finding space and resources for the massive increase in the Earth's human population, rapid extinction of other species, the need to develop renewable energy sources, the degradation of the oceans, deforestation and epidemic diseases—just to name a few.

Astronomy defined our home as a small planet tucked away in one corner of an average galaxy among million; biology took away our status as paragons created in the image of God; geology gave us the immensity of time and taught us how little of it our own species has occupied.

Some fifteen to twenty Burgess species cannot be allied with any known group, and should probably be classified as separate phyla. Magnify some of them beyond the few centimeters of their actual size, and you are on the set of a science-fiction film...

Consider the magnitude of this... Taxonomists have described almost a million species of arthropods, and all fit into four major groups; one quarry in British Columbia, representing the first explosion of multicellular life, reveals more than twenty additional arthropod designs!

Three days ago we not only ruled the earth, we had survivor's guilt about all the other species we'd wiped out on our climb to the nirvana of round-the-clock cable news and microwave popcorn. Now we're the Flashlight People.

Just imagine, among 8.7 million species, only one has become smart enough to ponder over the meaning of life. This simple evolutionary fact itself implies the gravitas of human life.

I came to the conclusion that bringing Humans to earth with an intact ability to LOVE is essential if we are to survive as a species.

Both humans and dogs love to play well into adulthood, and individuals from both species occasionally display evidence of having a conscience.

Just a few years ago, a graduate student at the University of California, Davis's Department of Ecology and Evolution determined that many species of birds, including juncos, finches, and warblers, have ventriloquial abilities. (Her research focused on a yellow-rumped warbler and a stuffed owl.) Other studies followed, all demonstrating that birds can adjust their "acoustic directionality" in order to beam their alarm calls in chosen directions.

The human species was given dominion over the earth and took the opportunity to exterminate other species and warm the atmosphere and generally ruin things in its own image, but it paid this price for its privileges: that the finite and specific animal body of this species contained a brain capable of conceiving the infinite and wishing to be infinite itself.

And Dunbar points out that in our ultrasocial species, success is largely a matter of playing the social game well. It's not what you know, it's who you know.

Surely there were other new and exciting methods. No species on earth outdoes humans for innovation, especially when it comes to stealing other people's shit.

human beings as a species have never failed to find reasons to regard one another with fear and loathing and thus to offer violence to one another.

Furthermore, a cell has no ability to improve its basic function. Bacteria that becomes resistant to antibiotics are still bacteria. Fruit flies that develop mutations are still fruit flies. Moths that change color are still moths. Birds that develop longer and shorter beaks are still birds. Therefore, one organism has no natural ability to change into another organism. (chapter 10)

In their natural habitats some of these species may be, like the golden-fronted bowerbird, easy to locate and observe but may nevertheless trick the biologist into treating them as "common" when they are really just "obvious," an important distinction.

Many collectors died in process of searching for new species, and despite persistent reports that the men died from drowning, gunshot and knife wounds, snakebite, trampling by cattle, or blows in the head with blunt instruments, it is generally accepted that in each case the primary cause of death was orchid fever.

felt great, free, abandoned, a different, improved, perfected specimen of a different, improved, perfected species. It was wild! It was beautiful! It really was.

Something similar (to bird migrations) draws human beings on pilgrimages as well… Pilgrimage is a spiritual as well as biological impulse, cutting across species. It's even a cosmic mystery. The Earth itself follows a 584-million-mile path around the sun each year. We're all defined by movement.

I have noticed that this kind of fanatic, like every other kind, is in two species: the species which too clearly thinks out its own insane theory, and the species which remains perfectly muddle-headed.

Fear is the mother of all emotion. Before love, hate, spite, grief, rage, and all the rest, there was fear, and fear gave birth to them all, and ask every combat soldier knows there are as many incarnations and species of fear as the Eskimo language has words for snow.

All the property that is necessary to a man for the conservation of the individual and his propagation of the species is his natural right, which none can justly deprive him of; but all property superfluous to such purposes is the property of the public, who by their laws have created it, and who may therefore by other laws dispose of it, whenever the welfare of the public shall demand such disposition. He that does not like civil society on these terms, let him retire and live among savages.

More than two million years ago, mammoths and Asian elephants took different evolutionary paths - and around the same time, according to DNA research, so did their lumbering relatives in Africa.

Life histories tell you just about everything you need to know about an animal.