Quotes About Origins

But what really excited me was the idea that humans had a tremendous pre-history that went back millions of years. I wanted to go to Africa to find some of these creatures.

There are still many tribal cultures where poetry and song, there is just one word for them. There are other cultures with literacy where poetry and song are distinguished. But poetry always remembers that it has its origins in music.

Slang has different functions: many of the words we use are playful and a lot are tribal - we speak the same way as the groups we are part of. A great deal are also euphemistic, so it's no surprise that a third of us are perplexed by their meanings and origins.

Individual tribes or, in other words, races or stocks, are the constituent elements of the earliest history.

He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the word and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.

I love snowboarding, but I would never want to do it competitively or at a professional level. Snowboarding is a spawn of skating, and skating is my passion.

I am sick of diseases, I want to know origins and processes…If we are to prevent disease it is to the beginning of the chain of accumulating stresses that we must look.

Just because people want to eat the burger doesn't mean they want to meet the cow.

There were probably less than one thousand Jews in America by the end of the eighteenth century.

with the Darwinian view for yet another reason. The Chengjiang discoveries intensify the top-down pattern of appearance

intelligent design is an evidence-based scientific theory about life's origins that challenges strictly materialistic views of evolution.

All this notwithstanding, I have long been aware of strong reasons for doubting that mutation and selection can add enough new information of the right kind to account for large-scale, or "macroevolutionary," innovations—the various information revolutions that have occurred after the origin of life.

In On the Origin of Species, Darwin openly acknowledged important weaknesses in his theory and professed his own doubts about key aspects of it. Yet today's public defenders of a Darwin-only science curriculum apparently do not want these, or any other scientific doubts about contemporary Darwinian theory, reported to students.

Oxford biologists Alan Cooper and Richard Fortey depict the Ediacaran fauna as lying on a line of descent separate from the Cambrian animals rather than being ancestral to them.23

This absence of clear affinities has led an increasing number of paleontologists to reject ancestor-descendant relationships between all but (at most) a few of the Ediacaran and Cambrian fauna.

Instead, the Precambrian–Cambrian fossil record, especially in light of the Burgess Shale after Walcott, points to the geologically sudden appearance of complex and novel body plans.

For nearly the entire history of life on this planet, 85 percent of that history in fact, life consisted solely of microorganisms. The last universal common ancestor (LUCA) for every life-form on this planet was bacterial. Again: The last universal common ancestor for every life-form on this planet was bacterial.

Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay.

We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a 'higher answer'– but none exists

If one were to rely solely on radiocarbon dating, the whole human world would seem to have started just over 40,000 years ago. Only

It turns out that, far from the world being a common genetic melting pot with massive to-and-fro prehistoric movements and mixings, the majority of the members of the modern human diaspora have conservatively stayed put in the colonies their ancestors first established. They

Sand did not suddenly come into being because we had need for glass and silicone. Neither did wild flowers suddenly spring up because a bunch of environmentalists in Texas wanted alternative ways of helping the world without dumping more chemicals into it - these things were already there.

The deduction reached by top modern philosophers on this question is that things exist for two reasons: they are either necessary or they were caused.

ALSO BY STEVE OLSON MAPPING HUMAN HISTORY: GENES, RACE, AND OUR COMMON ORIGINS COUNT DOWN: SIX KIDS VIE FOR GLORY AT THE WORLD'S TOUGHEST MATH COMPETITION ANARCHY EVOLUTION: FAITH, SCIENCE, AND BAD RELIGION IN A WORLD WITHOUT GOD (coauthored with Greg Graffin) ERUPTION: