Quotes About Species

A hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its habits.

When the views advanced by me in this volume, and by Mr. Wallace, and when analogous views on the origin of species are generally admitted, we can dimly foresee that there will be a considerable revolution in natural history.

I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term Natural Selection.

Man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits.

L'homme a un penchant naturel à imaginer des théories correctes de toutes espèces... Si l'homme n'était pas doué d'un esprit adapté à ses besoins, il n'aurait jamais pu acquérir aucune connaissance

There's a book called "A Dictionary of Angels." No one has opened it in fifty years, I know, because when I did, The covers creaked, the pages Crumbled. There I discovered The angels were once as plentiful As species of flies. The sky at dusk Used to be thick with them. You had to wave both arms Just to keep them away. Now the sun is shining Through the tall windows. The library is a quiet place. Angels and gods huddled In dark unopened books.

What I came to understand is that change is not a choice, not for a species of plant, not for me. It happens, and you are different.

God has far better things to do than creating self-important little species such as ours. He's got wars, deaths, disasters and diseases to ignore for starters. And a fair bit of not-exist-ing-at-all to be getting on with.

Everyone and everything we know and love. Thanks to a virus. We all carry mutations. Genetic mutations can give you laser vision. Or cancer. Or color blindness. Sometimes a mutation is on a DNA strand that doesn't do anything at all. And sometimes-- almost never-- a genetic mutation will cause an entire species to make an evolutionary leap forward. Think about it... a virus with powers. Sounds like something a biologist would want to protect.

If love were an animal, what species would it be and could you train it? Love would be two animals: a hummingbird and a snake. Both are perfectly untrainable.

then social learning is, down the line, affecting the genetic structure of the species.

However, there are actually few good data, or much theory, as to why relative brain size is the best indicator of cognitive ability, other than a general feeling that large animals need large brains. Instead, there is increasing evidence from structural analyses of brains, as well as from attempts to test species with different-sized brains on comparable tasks, that absolute size may be a better general measure of cognitive ability.

The bowhead lives its life extremely slowly, becoming sexually mature at about age twenty-five, with females giving birth every seven years or so; if it avoids the whalers, a bowhead has a good chance of living well past a century.19 It is definitively the

Morality, by promoting cooperative behavior, can change the whole population biology of a species, and it seems to be an important product of gene-culture coevolution in human societies.

3.2. Evolution of the marine mammals, showing aquatic, semiaquatic, and largely terrestrial groups of species. Copyright Emese Kazár.

We generally describe the most repulsive examples of man's cruelty as brutal or bestial, implying that such behavior is characteristic of less highly developed animals than ourselves. In fact, however, the extremes of brutal behavior are confined to us: there exists no parallel in nature to our savage treatment of each other. The unmistakable truth is that man is the most vicious and cruel species that ever walked the earth.

Infectious disease is one of the great tragedies of living things - the struggle for existence between two different forms of life... Incessantly, the pitiless war goes on, without quarter or armistice - a nationalism of species against species.

The love of cruelty is a component of human psychology as old as the species itself.

Nature is a big influence on my work. That's where the cosmic element comes in, an awareness of the relevance of what we do as a species, why we do it, and its implications.

[Children are] like talking animals. Their consciousness is so different from ours that they constitute a different species. They don't have to be particularly interesting children; just the fact that they are children is sufficient. They don't know what anything is, so they have to make it up. No matter how dull they are, they still have to figure things out for themselves.

If populations can interbreed with each other in their natural habitat, they belong to the same species. Of course, with fossil animals, that's not possible—if we wait for two fossils to interbreed, we'll be waiting a very long time.

If you have a clear idea of a soul, you will have a clear idea of a form; for it is of the same genus, though a different species.

These observations verify that chimpanzees are a second species—in addition to humans—that deliberately seek out and kill members of their own species. The remarkable violence of humanity is not uniquely ours. The species most closely related to us genetically—chimpanzees, with whom we share 98.4 percent of our DNA—also have a dark side to their nature.

In 2014, however, Chinese scientists were believed to have a 75% success rates cloning pigs. In the future, the procedure might be used to preserve endangered species or even revive extinct species. First experiments with DNA from a wild mountain goat, officially declared extinct in 1999, proved successful.