Quotes About Species

Red Queen theories hold that the world is competitive to the death. It does keep changing. But did we not just hear that species are static for many generations and do not change? Yes. The point about the Red Queen is that she runs but stays in the same place. The world keeps coming back to where it started; there is change but not progress.

Sex, according to the Red Queen theory, has nothing to do with adapting to the inanimate world—becoming bigger or better camouflaged or more tolerant of cold or better at flying—but is all about combating the enemy that fights back.

The common analogy for what Williams was describing is a lottery. Breeding asexually is like having lots of lottery tickets all with the same number. To stand a chance of winning the lottery, you need lots of different tickets. Therefore, sex is useful to the individual rather than the species when the offspring are likely to face changed or unusual conditions.

In the first place, Hildegard calls for a marriage of science and spirituality. For religion and the secular sciences to be sundered as they currently are is a blunder of immense proportions on the part of our species—and with potentially dire consequences.

Defended over the ages as necessary to human survival, now all of a sudden hunting is necessary to the animals' survival, at least those favored species deigned fit to exist. But think about what he is saying. What a jaded, selfish view of the world and our place within it - a kind of reverse Genesis in which every species shall now be summoned before almighty man to justify their existence or be banished from creation, man the Unmaker of all things.

He thought of all the living species that train their young in the art of survival, the cats who teach their kittens to hunt, the birds who spend such strident effort on teaching their fledglings to fly—yet man, whose tool of survival is the mind, does not merely fail to teach a child to think, but devotes the child's education to the purpose of destroying his brain, of convincing him that thought is futile and evil, before he has started to think.

For every living species, growth is a necessity of survival. Life is motion, a process of self-sustaining action that an organism must carry on in order to remain in existence. This principle is equally evident in the simple energy-conversions of a plant and in the long-range, complex activities of man. Biologically, inactivity is death.

The innate propensity to look for and impose structure is revealed as a prominent feature of our species both by archaeology and in extant hunter-gatherer societies.

I don't worry about the survival of the novel. We're a storytelling species.

At issue is not only knowledge of the world but our survival as individuals and as a species. All the basic technologies ever invented by humans to feed and protect themselves depend on a relentless commitment to hard-nosed empiricism: you cannot assume that your arrowheads will pierce the hide of a bison or that your raft will float just because the omens are propitious and you have been given supernatural reassurance that they will. You have to be sure.

Food culture in the United States has long been cast as the property of a privileged class. It is nothing of the kind. Culture is the property of a species.

Mary and Thatcher had lived in enviable times, when biologists were discovering new species right and left, not watching them go extinct.

A thought that stayed with me was that I had entered a private place in the earth. I had seen exposed nearly its oldest part. I had lost my sense of urgency, rekindled a sense of what people were, clambering to gain access to high waterfalls and a sense of our endless struggle as a species to understand time and to estimate the consequences of our acts.

Our first wisdom as a species, that unique metaphorical knowledge that distinguishes us, grew out of such an intimacy with the earth; and, however far we may have come since that time, it did not seem impossible to me that night to go back and find it. I wanted to enquire among these people, for what we now decide to do in the North has a certain frightening irrevocability about it.

The alarming situation here for humanity is that H. sapiens, though it has asserted itself as the dominant species on Earth, is at the same time the potential victim of its domination over virtually all Earth's ecosystems. If H. sapiens were to become extinct, the event would simply be regarded as evolution continuing to unfold, a biological future for life but not one that any longer included humanity.

Detta thought he and Eddie were monsters of some species she called Honk Mafahs.

The range of what is human is vast, ranging from the saintly to the monstrous. When we speak of other human beings as belonging to another species, we ignore the reality of our very nature.

As you are reading these words, you are taking part in one of the wonders of the natural world. For you and I belong to a species with a remarkable ability: we can shape events in each other's brains with exquisite precision.

So men are not from Mars, nor are women from Venus. Men and women are from Africa, the cradle of our evolution, where they evolved together as a single species.

In nature's talent show we are simply a species of primate with our own act, a knack for communicating information about who did what to whom by modulating the sounds we make when we exhale.

Existen buenas razones evolutivas para que los miembros de una especie inteligente intenten vivir en paz.

The most decisive repudiation of eugenics invokes classical liberal and libertarian principles: government is not an omnipotent ruler over human existence but an institution with circumscribed powers, and perfecting the genetic makeup of the species is not among them.

The goals installed in Homo sapiens, that problem-solving, social species, are not just the Four Fs. High on the list are understanding the environment and securing the cooperation of others.

men are not from Mars, nor are women from Venus. Men and women are from Africa, the cradle of our evolution, where they evolved together as a single species