Quotes About Species

But I don't call it immigration, I call it migration. As a species it's very healthy for us to get up and move around the planet. Sometimes certain groups of people have to do that for economic reasons. Nobody's doing it just to be spiteful. Everybody loves the idea of a homeland. I used to, but I've kind of got the bigger picture now. It's a home planet to me.

Biological systems are the product not of logic but of evolution, an inelegant process. Life does not choose the logically best design to meet a new situation. It adapts what already exists. Much of the human genome includes genes which are "conserved"; i.e., which are essentially the same as those in much simpler species. Evolution has built upon what already exists.

Reassortment mixes some of the segments of the genes of one virus with some from the other. It is like shuffling two different decks of cards together, then making up a new deck with cards from each one. This creates an entirely new hybrid virus, which increases the chances of a virus jumping from one species to another.

But the virus can adapt to man. It can do so directly, with an entire animal virus jumping to humans and adapting with a simple mutation. It can also happen indirectly. For one final and unusual attribute of the influenza virus makes it particularly adept at moving from species to species.

One of the riskiest nations on that list is the United States, where our actions threaten 14 percent of 8,812 assessed plants and animals with extinction and 283 species (3 percent) are known to have gone extinct.

Both as a young man and more recently, he first figuratively and then literally set out to "play God," initially by making the claim that humans had the power of gods and then during the past decade by creating an organization to save and restore endangered species with modern biotechnology.

Species diversity can be thought of as an insurance policy against today's environmental change and tomorrow's new evolutionary challenges.

Curiosity and the urge to solve problems are the emotional hallmarks of our species.

There are two problems for our species' survival - nuclear war and environmental catastrophe - and we're hurtling towards them. Knowingly.

... why are so many religious people arguing about the origin of the species but so few concerned about the extinction of the species?

We have environmental laws for a reason: to protect endangered biodiversity. And as a country that has one of the highest loss of species anywhere in the world, they're important.

We console ourselves with the comfortable fallacy that a single museum piece will do, ignoring the clear dictum of history that a species must be saved in many places if it is to be saved at all.

Global warming threatens the survival of our species.

We hope that as a species we're capable of dealing with environmental catastrophe before it actually does collectively kill most of us.

If there was ever a species that deserved purging from the surface of the planet, it is humanity. We are, or should be, a temporary infestation or infection, a smart virus awaiting its divine antidote.

Our earliest ancestors evolved a psychological switch that allowed them to dehumanize and kill members of their own species, and our modern weapons help too, by depersonalizing killing.

The fact that as the population of any species grows, the pressure on its natural resources increases and competition becomes more severe.

We are, as a species, in the process of proving Malthus's proposition that population will always outstrip resources.

La percepción que tenemos del tiempo es errónea. El tiempo es una dimensión repleta de partículas de energía. Cada especie, cada individuo y cada átomo atraviesan esta dimensión de una manera diferente. Puede que algún día demuestre que es el tiempo el que contiene al universo, y no al revés.

In the beauty and grandeur of individual trees, and in number and variety of species, the Sierra forests surpass all others

think I get it. Destroying a depot to get what you want, when it gives stuff away freely, would be killing a goose that laid the golden eggs. You could, if you're shortsighted." He stopped, thought for a moment. "I wonder, can a species that embarks on multi-century voyages be shortsighted? Good question

The purpose of depots like this one is to allow contact between alien species without direct contact. Early on, direct contacts were tried many times, by many different species, in many different ways. It almost always went badly. With few exceptions, alien species are too different from each other to allow constructive interaction. At best the efforts were extremely discomforting to one or both of the contactees. At worst, one or both found the other genuinely repugnant in some way.

Two classics stuck with them. Ender's Game delighted them all; here were soldiers who were just like them, except smaller. The main character was even bred to fight alien species like they were. The next day the members of the 8th greeted each other with the salutation ::Ho, Ender,:: until Brahe told them to knock it off and pay attention.

Some planets evolved genetic structures roughly similar to Earth's, incorporating some if not all the nucleotides involved in terrestrial genetics (perhaps not coincidentally, the intelligent species of these planets have been known to consume humans from time to time;