Quotes About Species

Since the dawn of time, several billion human (or humanlike) beings have lived, each contributing a little genetic variability to the total human stock.

Baron Rothschild, whose obsessive quest for rare species led to the annihilation of several.

This is a point known to geology as the KT boundary1 and it marks the time, 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs and roughly half the world's other species of animals abruptly vanish from the fossil record.

Over time, each of these principal groupings split into further subdivisions, of which some prospered and some faltered. Anapsids gave rise to the turtles, which for a time, perhaps a touch improbably, appeared poised to predominate as the planet's most advanced and deadly species, before an evolutionary lurch let them settle for durability rather than dominance.

As Siddhartha Mukherjee observed in The Gene: An Intimate History, humans don't actually reproduce at all.8 Geckos reproduce; we recombine.

The tiniest deviation from any of these evolutionary imperatives and you might now be licking algae from cave walls or lolling walrus-like on some stony shore or disgorging air through a blowhole in the top of your head before diving sixty feet for a mouthful of delicious sandworms. Not

On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life

report in The Economist as much as 97 per cent of the world's plant and animal species may still await discovery. Of

You would be hard pressed, I would submit, to find a better pairing of occurrences to illustrate the divine and felonious nature of the human being—a species of organism that is capable of unravelling the deepest secrets of the heavens while at the same time pounding into extinction, for no purpose at all, a creature that never did us any harm and wasn't even remotely capable of understanding what we were doing to it as

Steller's sea cow, named after the German naturalist Georg Steller, who discovered a small community of them living on Bering Island, off the coat of Siberia, in 1741. Hunted mercilessly by humans, within thirty years of its discovery by Steller this remarkable species was extinct.

Within the animal kingdom only humans and guinea pigs are unable to synthesize vitamin C in their own bodies.

Together the pigeons and doves make up the family Columbidae, with three hundred species, from doves smaller than sparrows to the Victoria crowned pigeon, the size of a turkey.)

Having indeed seen so many things and considered so much, I have finally begun to understand how many are these desires with which the human species burns. Lest you consider me immune to all the sins of men, there is one implacable passion that holds me which so far I have been neither able nor willing to check, for I flatter myself that the desire for noble things is not dishonorable. Do you wish to hear the nature of this disease? I am unable to satisfy my thirst for books.

Errors of nature differ from singular instances in this, that the latter are prodigies of species, the former of individuals. Their use is pretty nearly the same, for they correct the erroneous impressions suggested to the understanding by ordinary phenomena, and reveal common forms.

Are we open-minded enough to assume that other species have a mental life? Are we creative enough to investigate it? Can we tease apart the roles of attention, motivation, and cognition? Those three are involved in everything animals do; hence poor performance can be explained by any one of them.

Emotions evolved, in short, for their capacity to induce adaptive reactions to danger, competition, mating opportunities, and so on. Emotions are action-prone. Our species shares many emotions with the other primates because we rely on approximately the same behavioral repertoire.

There are lots of wonderful cognitive adaptations out there that we don't have or need. This is why ranking cognition on a single dimension is a pointless exercise. Cognitive evolution is marked by many peaks of specialization. The ecology of each species is key. The

if two closely related species act the same under similar circumstances, the mental processes behind their behavior are likely the same, too. The alternative would be to postulate that, in the short time since they diverged, both species evolved different ways of generating the same behavior.

There are lots of wonderful cognitive adaptations out there that we don't have or need. This is why ranking cognition on a single dimension is a pointless exercise. Cognitive evolution is marked by many peaks of specialization. The ecology of each species is key.

When we are considering species like the apes, which are aptly known as "anthropoids" (humanlike), however, anthropomorphism is in fact a logical choice. Dubbing an ape's kiss "mouth-to-mouth contact" so as to avoid anthropomorphism deliberately obfuscates the meaning of the behavior. It would be like assigning Earth's gravity a different name than the moon's, just because we think Earth is special.

En vez de convertir a la humanidad en la medida de todas las cosas, tenemos que evaluar a las otras especies por lo que son ellas mismas. Al hacerlo, estoy seguro de que descubriremos muchos pozos mágicos, incluyendo algunos que por ahora están más allá de nuestra imaginación.

A species's cognition is generally as good as what it needs for its survival.

There is no single form of cognition, and there is no point in ranking cognitions from simple to complex. A species's cognition is generally as good as what it needs for its survival. (p. 200)

True empathy is not self-focused but other-oriented. Instead of making humanity the measure of all things, we need to evaluate other species by what they are. In doing so, I am sure we will discover many magic wells, including some as yet beyond our imagination.