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Evolution Quotes

Browse 3937 quotes about Evolution.

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Evolution Quotes

“Human beings were not well served by permanence or stasis. Obviously, if individuals were progressing, they were undergoing a series of presumably desirable alterations, but in a universe where flux is fundamental, it can be argued that even change for the worse is preferable to no change at all. Isn't fixity the hallmark of the living dead?.”

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Book:Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates
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“For the whole consequence of evolution from blind impulse through conscious will to self conscious knowledge, seems still somehow to correspond to a continued result of births, rebirths and new births, which reach from the birth of the child from the mother, beyond the birth of the individual from the mass, to the birth of the creative work from the individual and finally to the birth of knowledge from the work.”

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Book:journal
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“In the course of evolution nature has gone to endless trouble to see that every individual is unlike every other individual....Physically and mentally, each one of us is unique. Any culture which, in the interests of efficiency or in the name of some political or religious dogma, seeks to standardize the human individual, commits an outrage against man's biological nature.”

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Author:Aldous Huxley
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“I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution , where the wave of life bursts into individual, sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment... only to vanish forever.”

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Book:The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
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“There are many other (besides testosterone) behaviour-eliciting hormones fundamental for humen well-being, including estrogen and progesterone in females. The fact that complex behavioural patterns can be triggered by a tiny concentration of moleculas coursing through the bloodstream, and that different animals of the same species generate different amounts of these hormones, is something worth thinking about when it's time to judge such matters as free will, individual responsibility, and law and order.”

ThinkingWellsDifferentMatterFactsLawOrderIndividualAnimalResponsibilityJudgingEvolutionAmountFemaleFundamentalsSpeciesComplexesIncludingPatternsTinyWell BeingConcentrationFree WillBehaviourHormonesLaw And OrderTestosteroneIndividual ResponsibilityEstrogenDifferent Animals
Author:Carl Sagan
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“The usual sniggering examples of animal behaviour were brought in to explain cheating. Funny how the behaviour of shrews and gibbons is never used to explain table manners or road safety or gardening, only sex. Anyway, it was bad Darwinism. Taking the example of a monkey and applying it to yourself misses the point that animal behaviour is made for the benefit of the species, not as an excuse for the individual. Being incapable of sustaining a stable pair and supporting children is really not in the interests of our species. Neither is it really in the best interests of the philanderer.”

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Author:A. A. Gill
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“When certain unmarried men, who had lost their capacity to sin, sat indoors, breathing bad air, and passed resolutions about what was right and what wrong, making rules for the guidance of the people, instead of trusting to the natural, happy instincts of the individual, they ushered in the Dark Ages. These are the gentlemen who blocked human evolution absolutely for a thousand years.”

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Author:Elbert Hubbard
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“It should soon be possible dramatically to increase the intelligence and life span of a few individuals. They and their offspring could become a master race. Evolution pays no regard to social justice. It was not fair on the Neanderthals they were replaced by modern humans.”

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Author:Stephen Hawking
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“Evolution has no moral direction. An evolutionary understanding of human nature can explain the differing intuitions we have when we are faced with an individual rather than with a mass of people, or with people close to us rather than with those far away, but it does not justify those feelings.”

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Book:The Life You Can Save: How to play your part in ending world poverty
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“When the first human began to read and write, he or she set the world upon a new evolution. Similarly, if a few individuals have the strength and the power to walk away from the restrictions of the world and to stand fearlessly beyond it, eventually, in some distant millennium, all mankind will also come to that same liberation.”

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Book:The Trick to Money is Having Some
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“What the activity of this disposition of ours means in the evolution of the world, we do not know. Nor can we regulate this activity from outside; we must leave entirely to each individual its shaping and its extension. From every point of view, then, world- and life-affirmation and ethics are non-rational, and we must have the courage to admit it.”

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Book:Civilization and Ethics
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“A spiritual partnership is a partnership between equals for the purpose of spiritual growth. Nothing like this archetype has existed before because nothing like this was required before in the human experience. And spiritual partnerships can be created in a biological family, they can be created among friends, they can be created in the workplace, they can be created anywhere that two or more individuals are committed to their own spiritual evolution and are striving to relate to each other as equals.”

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Author:Gary Zukav
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“We no longer see the evolution of the nervous system, but that of a certain individual. The role of the memory is very important but... not as important as we believe. Most of the important things that we do don't depend on memory. To hear, to see, to touch, to feel happiness and pain; these are functions which are independent of memory; it is an a priori thing. Thus, for me, what memory does is to modify that a priori thing, and this it does in a very profound way.”

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Author:Rodolfo Llinas
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“There is first the problem of acquiring content, which is learning. There is another problem of acquiring learning skills, which is not merely learning, but learning to learn, not velocity, but acceleration. Learning to learn is one of the great inventions of living things. It is tremendously important. It makes evolution, biological as well as social, go faster. And it involves the development of the individual.”

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Author:Ralph W. Gerard
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“Social evolution is a resultant of the interaction of two wholly distinct factors: the individual ... bearing all the power of initiative and origination in his hands; and, second, the social environment with its power of adopting or rejecting both him and his gifts. Both factors are essential to change. The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.”

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Book:Essays in Popular Philosophy: Top Essays
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“What makes the existence and the evolution of society possible is precisely the fact that peaceful cooperation under the social division of labor in the long run best serves the selfish concerns of all individuals. The eminence of the market society is that its whole functioning and operation is the consummation of this principle.”

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Author:Ludwig von Mises
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“It is not up to us to particularize, but rather to deduce that the concepts of human rights originated from the divine influence because, as far as we are concerned, we are compelled to recognize our slow individual evolution from fierce selfishness toward a universal love, from the iniquity toward true justice.”

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Author:Chico Xavier
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“It's like in biological evolution: The population will evolve, even though individuals can't. The same thing happens in the corporate world: The population of business units within corporations evolves, even though individual business units can't. That's because the capabilities of business units reside in their processes and their values, and by their very nature, processes and values are inflexible and meant not to change.”

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Author:Clayton Christensen
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“On the one hand the world is getting more integrated and we should not dismiss social values as "Western" when they are actually modern values. On the other hand, individual countries have their own history and their own evolution. Trade unions, for example, don't play the same role in China as they do in Europe or the US.”

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Author:Zhang Xin
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“Group selection and individual selection are just two of the selection processes that have played important roles in evolution. There also is selection within individual organisms (intragenomic conflict), and selection among multi-species communities (an idea that now is getting attention in work on the human microbiome). All four of these levels of selection find a place in multi-level selection theory.”

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Author:Elliott Sober
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“Every reader of the Conversations with the God is invited to self-select, that is, to choose themselves, to be among those who commit to moving forward their own individual and personal evolution by embracing and demonstrating behaviors that serve to awaken the species to who and what human beings really are Individuations of Divinity, and how that may be made manifest in our experience.”

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Author:Neale Donald Walsch
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“I think that there's a sense of self-reliance that exists in skateboarding that kids can take to their daily lives. I think there's also a sense of creativity and community-based goals - in skating, even though it is an individual pursuit, a lot of things that you learn are things that you borrow and expand from other people's ideas. I call skating a combined evolution - it's individual, it's artistic, but at the time, there is a communal push to keep doing your thing. And a sense of camaraderie in that.”

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Author:Tony Hawk
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“There is behavioral ecology, which looks closely at the difference different ecologies make to behavior and other features of animals and humans. There's evolutionary individual psychology, there's evolutionary social psychology. In Darwin's terms, evolution couldn't exist without variation, and variation is important in behavioral genetics. And so on, and so on. There are so many instances in which evolution actually sharpens the precision, I think, with which one can find out the importance of differences. We're interested in differences as well as commonalities.”

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Author:Brian Boyd
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“All political theories assume, of course, that most individuals are very ignorant. Those who plead for liberty differ from the rest in that they include among the ignorant themselves as well as the wisest. Compared with the totality of knowledge which is continually utilized in the evolution of a dynamic civilization, the difference between the knowledge that the wisest and that the most ignorant individual can deliberately employ is comparatively insignificant.”

WellsPoliticalCoursesIndividualDifferencesLibertyTheoryEvolutionCivilizationAssumingIgnorantInsignificantWisestTotalityPolitical Theory
Author:Friedrich August von Hayek
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“Speciation does not necessarily promote evolutionary change; rather, speciation 'gathers in' and guards evolutionary change by locking and stabilization for sufficient geological time within a Darwinian individual of the appropriate scale. If a change in a local population does not gain such protection, it becomes-to borrow Dawkins's metaphor at a macroevolutionary scale-a transient duststorm in the desert of time, a passing cloud without borders, integrity, or even the capacity to act as a unit of selection, in the panorama of life's phylogeny.”

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Book:Punctuated Equilibrium
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“As I have already urged, the practice of that which is ethically best - what we call goodness or virtue - involves a course of conduct which, in all respects, is opposed to that which leads to success in the cosmic struggle for existence. In place of ruthless selfassertion it demands self-restraint; in place of thrusting aside, or treading down, all competitors, it requires that the individual shall not merely respect , but shall help his fellows. It repudiates the gladiatorial theory of existence. Laws and moral precepts are directed to the end of curbing the cosmic process.”

EndsSelfHelpingLawScienceCoursesIndividualProcessExistenceMoralPracticeStruggleVirtueTheoryEvolutionDemandGoodnessFellowsCosmicRestraintCompetitorsRuthlessAssertionSelf RestraintTreadingStruggle For Existence
Author:Thomas Huxley
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“All the acquisitions or losses wrought by nature on individuals, through the influence of the environment in which their race has long been placed, and hence through the influence of the predominant use or permanent disuse of any organ; all these are preserved by reproduction to the new individuals which arise, provided that the acquired modifications are common to both sexes, or at least to the individuals which produce the young.”

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Author:Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
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