While most science moves in a sort of curve, being constantly corrected by new evidence, this science flies off into space in a straight line uncorrected by anything. But the habit of forming conclusions, as...

Out of the choked Devonian waters emerged sight and sound and the music that rolls invisible through the composer’s brain. They are there still in the ooze along the tideline, though no one notices. The...

When you gaze out on a quiet, peaceful meadow, next to a still pond, under a motionless blue sky, you wonder how the noisy, busy cacophony of life could have arisen from such silent, motionless...

Man wants to see nature and evolution as separate from human activities. There is a natural world, and there is man. But man also belongs to the natural world. If he is a ferocious predator,...

The point I want to make about methanogens is that they were the losers in the race through a bottleneck, yet nonetheless survived in niche environments. Similarly, on a larger scale, it is rare for...

All social animals, including people, live under constant pressure from two competing interests: protecting themselves from others and aligning themselves with others. When these two interests are balanced, the result is dynamic social homeostasis.

All of today’s DNA, strung through all the cells of the earth, is simply an extension and elaboration of [the] first molecule.

Evolution… is the most powerful and the most comprehensive idea that has ever arisen on Earth.

Darwinism by itself did not produce the Holocaust, but without Darwinism… neither Hitler nor his Nazi followers would have had the necessary scientific underpinnings to convince themselves and their collaborators that one of the worlds...

Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains — cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal...

Evolution isn’t true, because if we evolved from monkeys, how can they still be here?

We think we know that chimpanzees are higher animals and earthworms are lower, we think we’ve always known what that means, and we think evolution makes it even clearer. But it doesn’t. It is by...

We are built to be effective animals, not happy ones.

Theory of Evolution (Summary)First, there were some amoebas. Deviant amoebas adapted better to the environment, thus becoming monkeys. Then came Total Quality Management.

Though we became experimental creatures of our own devising, it’s important to bear in mind that we had no inkling of this process, let alone its consequences, until only the last six or seven of...

But because humans are intensely social animals, they also faced a recurring set of crucial social evolutionary challenges. These evolutionary challenges include (1) evading physical harm, (2) avoiding disease, (3) making friends, (4) gaining status,...

The world doesn’t change in front of your eyes, it changes behind your back.

And, you know, politics aside, the success of Sarah Palin and women like her is good for all women – except, of course —those who will end up, you know, like, paying for their own...

The conditions necessary for devastating epidemics or pandemics just didn’t exist until the agricultural revolution. The claim that modern medicine and sanitation save us from infectious diseases that ravaged pre-agricultural people (something we hear often)...

We are only fully human when we act as if the life beyond us matters.

A grand and almost untrodden field of inquiry will be opened, on the causes and laws of variation, on correlation of growth, on the effects of use and disuse, on the direct actions of external...

I take leave to contradict those who say that salvation is an evolution! All that ever can be evolved out of the sinful heart of man is sin-and nothing else! Salvation is the free gift...

[Intelligent design advocates were ebullient Tuesday.] It’s very significant for the students of Kansas, … Instead of just the evidence that supports evolution, they’re going to see all sides.

Not that chance dominated events in the early Solar System, for scientific determinism was also functioning. But chance is an essential factor in all evolutionary events, and the birth and development of our planetary system...

Disaster is a natural part of my evolution toward tragedy and dissolution.

In the realm of Greater Understanding, the workshop is dismantled after the work is finished.

To copy a virtue in another is more copying than it is virtue. Try to learn what that virtue is based upon.

it was being written in the East that ‘Sufism was formerly a reality without a name: now it is a name without a reality’.

It is just part of the evolving market. We are just doing it a little less subtly than Disney does it, and it is happening all at once. It’s just what happens. It’s called evolution....

Natural selection is a blind and undirected consequence of the interaction between variation and the environment. Natural selection exists only in the continuous present of the natural world: it has no memory of its previous...

Evolution on the large scale unfolds, like much of human history, as a succession of dynasties.

I heard that Jesus had a pet dinosaur. Evolution must be a myth then.

Reinvent new combinations of what you already own. Improvise. Become more creative. Not because you have to, but because you want to. Evolution is the secret for the next step.

We consciously decide whether to consider people; we fall in love despite ourselves; we entirely fail to fall in love with people who fall in love with us. It is a mightily complicated business.

When it comes to society and human consciousness, Darwinism still exists in its primal message.

Readers of Darwin’s life, for instance, and particularly of the published correspondence of Darwin, are henceforth naturalists in the making. Ever afterwards they are Darwins on a small scale, seeing animals and plants in an...

It is not a matter of whether one is biased or not. It is really a question of which bias is the best bias with which to be biased.

As Karl Marx once noted: ‘Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.’ William Jennings...

If only we could have talked to you, the hive-queen said in Ender’s words. But since it could not be, we ask only this: that you remember us, not as enemies, but as a tragic...

Nature is a hanging judge,” goes an old saying. Many tragedies come from our physical and cognitive makeup. Our bodies are extraordinarily improbable arrangements of matter, with many ways for things to go wrong and...

The very comprehensibility of the world points to an intelligence behind the world. Indeed, science would be impossible if our intelligence were not adapted to the intelligibility of the world. The match between our intelligence...

My main reason for scepticism about the Huxley/Sagan theory is that the human brain is demonstrably eager to see faces in random patterns, as we know from scientific evidence, on top of the numerous legends...

What shall it profit a male if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his immortal genes?

You know you are truly alive, when you care for every living thing. One day soon, it will be the norm to view others not as competition, but gifts to share this gorgeous planet with,...

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

One of the most important discoveries from studying ancient mitochondrial DNA is the estimate of when humans diverged in evolution from the Neanderthals – around half a million years ago,

Remember meditation is an active, deep remembrance, and that is discernment. Wherever you go, wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, remember to utilize discernment so that you can hear and sense and feel the vibration...

Evolution did not design us to believe only true facts, nor to buy only useful products, nor to say only meaningful sentences

We do not know how life began.

My body lies within the strings and myths of reality with a purpose of evolution and adapted by gravity but for my conscious’s matrix is without any doubt has adapted to other’s consciousness and that...