Quotes About Species

You know, your species [humans] has the most amazing capacity for self-deception, matched only by its ingenuity in trying to destroy itself.

it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.

true revolution in our relationship to reality, that emerges out of the idea that a species is not whole unless a relationship between the living and the dead is an ordinary part of life.

We may make contact with ambitious species on other planets or stars; soon thereafter there will be interplanetary war. Then, and only then, will we of this earth be one.

There are not many things finer in our murderous species than this noble curiosity, this restless and reckless passion to understand.

Custom gives the same stability to the group that heredity and instinct give to the species, and habit to the individual. It is the routine that keeps men sane; for if there were no grooves along which thought and action might move with unconscious ease, the mind would be perpetually hesitant, and would soon take refuge in lunacy.

Thanks be then to nature for this unsociableness, for this envious jealousy and vanity, for this insatiable desire for possession and for power.. Man wishes concord; but nature knows better what is good for his species; and she wills discord, in order that man may be impelled to a new exertion of his powers, and to the further development of his natural capacities.

When he sent to Voltaire his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, with its arguments against civilization, letters, and science, and for a return to the natural condition as seen in savages and animals, Voltaire replied: "I have received, sir, your new book against the human species, and I thank you for it . . . . No one has ever been so witty as you are in trying to turn us into brutes; to read your book makes one long to go on all fours.

Darwin furthered the transformation. As the astronomer had lost the Earth in space, the biologist lost man in the infinity of time, in the long procession of transitory species that had walked the earth or swum the sea or flown the air; man became a mere line in Nature's interminable odyssey. But it was Darwin, too, who opened a way to what John Morley called "the next great task of science—to create a new religion for humanity.

If tribal thinking is original sin, then story is prayer. At its best, it reminds us that, beneath our many differences, we remain beasts of one species.

Uncounted species--not just charismatic animals like tigers, gorillas, rhinos, and saola but an even larger number of obscure rodents, amphibians, birds, and reptiles--have been pressed to the brink. We hardly know them, and yet within the vastness of the universe, they and the rest of Earth's biota are our only known companions. Without them, our loneliness would stretch to infinity.

The greatest danger that besets us does not come from believers or atheists; it comes from those who, under the guise of religion, science or reason, imagine that we can free ourselves from the limitations of human nature and perfect the human species.

Becoming vegan is the most important and direct change we can immediately make to save the planet and its species.

So we have to recognize that species concepts are humanly produced categories which may or may not always work when compared with the reality of nature.

We all are weak, in one way or another. It does not matter the species. Some times that weakness is a strength in dusguise. Sometimes it is our utter undoing. Some times it is both. A wise man seeks to find a lesson from it. A fool lets it control and destroy him. And sometimes the wise man is the fool.

You may discover that a certain sequence of letters in your autosomal DNA is typically found in someone with Finnish heritage or Korean ancestry. Only a few years ago the world of science was turned upside down when it was discovered that in ancient times two nonhuman species contributed to the human genome.

In our evolutionary history some individuals must have been born with a greater inclination and ability to collaborate than our common ancestor with chimpanzees. These individuals were more successful and bred more offspring with those characteristics [...]. What we have evolved into now is a species for whom an experience means little if it's not shared.

While all living things affect the evolution of other living things simply by virtue of trying to stay alive, humans interact with the biological evolution of other species in a much more complex and powerful fashion because of one ability: language. Nothing occurs on the human scale without language. No language means no agriculture, no animal farming, no science.

In just the last few years we have learned that 85 percent of all people carry DNA from Neanderthals, an entirely different species that lived until 27,000 years ago. If the research on the human genome hasn't completely destroyed the idea of genetic purity, our newly discovered Neanderthal ancestors show how truly absurd the notion is.

A child's ability to learn many words is so completely different from anything observed in other species that many researchers propose that some neural mechanism must be especially dedicated to this acquisition of linguistic knowledge.

There are more than nine hundred species of bats, a figure that represents almost a quarter of all mammal species on earth,

Millions of years ago, we evolved three basic drives: the sex drive, romantic love and attachment to a long-term partner. These circuits are deeply embedded in the human brain. They're going to survive as long as our species survives.

Great men are the true men, the men in whom Nature has succeeded. They are not extraordinary--they are in the true order. It is the other species of men who are not what they ought to be.

No existing form of anthropoid ape is even remotely related to the stock which has given rise to man.