Quotes About Evolutionary

The greatest impact of the Darwinian revolution...was that it completed the liberation from superstition and fear that began in the physical sciences a few centuries before. Man, too, is a natural phenomenon. [in "The evolutionary concept of man", 1972, p. 35.]

The argument about zoning and the presidency of Nigeria is like the philosophical argument of the egg or the hen. Who is older through the evolutionary process, who came first?

I believe I've found the missing link between animal and civilized man. It is us.

Britain, relative to the U.S., is a highly secular society. Philanthropy alone cannot fill the gap left by government cutbacks. And the sources of altruism go deep into our evolutionary past.

I believe that architecture, as anything else in life, is evolutionary. Ideas evolve; they don't come from outer space and crash into the drawing board.

This nationality business helps you make a great story and satisfies your hunger for ascription of causes. It seems to be the dump site where all explanations go until one can ferret out a more obvious one (such as, say, some evolutionary argument that "makes sense"). Indeed

Judging people by their beliefs is not scientific. There is no such thing as the "rationality" of a belief, there is rationality of action. The rationality of an action can be judged only in terms of evolutionary considerations.

When you consider beliefs in evolutionary terms, do not look at how they compete with each other, but consider the survival of the populations that have them.

So I use procrastination as a message from my inner self and my deep evolutionary past to resist interventionism in my writing.

I later got some plausible explanation from evolutionary psychology, which claims that such physical manifestations of one's performance in life, just like an animal's dominant condition, can be used for signaling: It makes the winners seem easily visible, which is efficient in mate selection.

The viruses that cause smallpox, influenza, hepatitis, measles, encephalitis, and viral pneumonia; the bacteria that cause tuberculosis, diphtheria, cholera, typhus, scarlet fever, and bacterial meningitis—by a quirk of evolutionary history, all were unknown in the Western Hemisphere.

The planetary genome and proteome have been mapped so exhaustively that the biosciences are now focusing on the challenge of the phenome—plotting the phase-space defined by the intersection of genes and biochemical structures, understanding how extended phenotypic traits are generated and contribute to evolutionary fitness.

Most of them are doomed to rapid extinction, but a few may make evolutionary inventions, such as physiological, ecological, or behavioral innovations that give these species improved competitive potential.

Moreover, the concern of some that moving DNA among species would breach customary breeding barriers and have profound effects on natural evolutionary processes has substantially disappeared as the science revealed that such exchanges occur in nature.

These machines are going to reflect our species and our evolutionary process. Everything we are will end up in these artificially intelligent machines no matter what we do.

Tao also provides you with information and ideas , arranges meetings and opportunities , and pressures you with adversity when you have strayed from the evolutionary path that establishes your destiny on planet Earth.

All societies that have tried to keep themselves 'pure,' from the Confucian Chinese through to the Castilian Spanish to the post-Wilhelmine Germans, have collapsed into barbarism, insularity and superstition. And swiftly enough for us to be certain that the fall was no more connected to the genes than was the rise. There is no gene for I.Q., and there is no genetic or evolutionary timing that is short enough to explain histories or societies.

Konrad Lorenz, a zoologist, pointed out—and this is part of what won him a Nobel Prize—that attachment can be understood within an evolutionary context in that the mother provides safety for the infant. Attachment is adaptive, enhancing the infant's chance of survival, and is therefore hard-wired into the brain. A baby needs to be held, loved, and cuddled by the mother.

Evolution intended us to be travelers….Settlement for any length of time, in cave or castle, has at best been…a drop in the ocean of evolutionary time." —Bruce Chatwin, ANATOMY OF RESTLESSNESS

Evolution intended us to be travelers….Settlement for any length of time, in cave or castle, has at best been…a drop in the ocean of evolutionary time.

Because gender can be uncomfortable, there are easy ways to close this conversation. Some people will bring up evolutionary biology and apes, how female apes bow to male apes - that sort of thing. But the point is this: we are not apes. Apes also live in trees and eat earthworms. We do not.

'Avatar' is staggering. It's seismic. Evolutionarily speaking, it is cladogenesis in a thunderclap.

We thus learn that man is descended from a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World.

If there was an observer on Mars, they would probably be amazed that we have survived this long. There are two problems for our species' survival - nuclear war and environmental catastrophe - and we're hurtling towards them. Knowingly. This hypothetical Martian would probably conclude that human beings were an evolutionary error.