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Quote by Charles Darwin

“La plupart des animaux et des plantes qui vivent tout auprès d'un petit terrain, quel qu'il soit, pourraient vivre sur ce terrain, en supposant toutefois que sa nature n'offrît aucune particularité extraordinaire; on pourrait même dire qu'ils font tous leurs efforts pour s'y porter, mais on voit que, quand la lutte devient très vive, les avantages résultant de la diversité de structure, ainsi que des différences d'habitudes et de constitution qui en sont les conséquences, font que les habitants qui se coudoient ainsi de plus près appartiennent en règle générale à ce que nous appelons des genres et des ordres différents.”

Quote by Charles Darwin

Work

The Origin of Species

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Author

Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin, a British naturalist, is renowned as the founder of evolutionary biology. Born on February 12, 1809, in England, he passed away on April 19, 1882. Darwin is best known for his research on the theory of evolution, which proposed that species evolve through natural selection and survival of the fittest. more

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“To conclude: time doesn’t pass. (I hope the reader is now convinced!) Well, what does pass, then? I shall argue that it is the conscious awareness of the fleeting self that changes from moment to moment. The misconception that time flows or passes can be traced back to the tacit assumption of a conserved self. It is natural for people to think that ‘they’ endure from moment to moment while the world changes because ‘time flows’. But as Alice remarked in Lewis Carroll’s story, ‘It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.’ Alice was right: ‘you’ are not the same today as you were yesterday. To be sure, there is a very strong correlation – a lot of mutual information, to get technical about it – between today’s you and yesterday’s you – a thread of information made up of memories and beliefs and desires and attitudes and other things that usually change only slowly, creating an impression of continuity. But continuity is not conservation. There are future yous correlated with (that is, observing) future states of the world, and past yous correlated with (observing) past states of the world. At each moment, the you appropriate to that world-state interprets the correlation with that state as ‘now’. It is indeed ‘now’ for ‘that you’ at ‘that time’. That’s all! The flow-of-time phenomenon reveals ‘the self’ as a slowly evolving complex pattern of stored information that can be accessed at later times and provide an informational template against which fresh perceptions can be matched. The illusion of temporal flow stems from the inevitable slight mismatches.”

“...there will be nights when they can't deal with all the space around them, the time passing, the schizophrenic burr of Father's voice in their brains. Nights in the years to come, when their stories are no longer theirs, and they can barely hear each other over the screaming headlines. Nights after everything's gone to shit and their dreams are decaying bodies in a distant place. Nights when their voices are the only thing to remind each other that the good things, love, beauty, family, still exist; that the night, endless as it seems, cannot undo their progress.”