Quotes about evolution

Just as Darwin’s theory predicted: at the right time, at the right place, we had found intermediates between two apparently different kinds of animals.

We got the way we are, Jeanie, because life on Earth is one long fight for limited resources. Our bloody-mindedness all started out as food battles, three billion years ago.

An animal doesn’t need to develop curiosity and intelligence if it has no problems that need solving.

Finally, in one fateful trillionth of a second, a nuclear compound was formed that had two very important properties: it was stable, and it could make a copy of itself.

Life had come to the crust of the neutron star.

“The Core knows what Teilhard de Chardin and other sentimentalists refused to acknowledge: evolution is not progress, that there is no ‘goal’ or direction to evolution. Evolution is change. Evolution ‘succeeds’ if that change best adapts some leaf or branch of its tree of life to conditions of the universe.

“Humanity has evolved—as far as it has evolved,” continued the old priest, “with no thanks to its predecessors or itself. Evolution brings human beings. Human beings, through a long and painful process, bring humanity.”

“Empathy,” Aenea said softly.

In a flash she understood herself for what she was: an exceedingly smart monkey. She was a smart monkey who had travelled across interplanetary space in a thing made by other smart monkeys. And the fact of this was enough to make her laugh out loud, as if she had suddenly, belatedly, grasped the punchline to a very involved joke.

I’m the punchline, Sunday thought. I’m the period, the full stop at the end of an immensely long and convoluted chain of happenstance and contingency stretching from the discovery of fire down in the Olduvai Gorge, through the inventions of language and paper and the wheel, through all the unremembered centuries to…this. This condition. Being brought out of hibernation aboard a spaceship orbiting another planet. Being alive in the twenty-second century. Being a thing with a central nervous system complex enough to understand the concept of being a thing with a central nervous system. Simply being.

Consider all the inanimate matter in the universe, all the dumb atoms, all the mindless molecules, all the oblivious dust grains and pebbles and rocks and iceballs and worlds and stars, all the unthinking galaxies and superclusters, wheeling through the oblivious time-haunted megaparsecs of the cosmic supervoid. In all that immensity, she had somehow contrived to be a human being, a microscopically tiny, cosmically insignificant bundle of information-processing systems, wired to a mind more structurally complex than the Milky Way itself, maybe even more complex than the rest of the whole damned universe.

She had threaded the needle of creation and stabbed the cosmic bullseye.

Evolution doesn’t greatly care about what happens to creatures once they’ve passed on their genetic heritage.

Afterwards, when Clavain tried to imaging how he might describe it, he found that words were never going to be adequate for the task. And that was no surprise: evolution had shaped language to convey many concepts, but going from a single to a networked topology of self was not amongst them.

Three revolutions mark the history of life on earth. The first was the origin of life itself... The second... was the origin of multicellular organisms... The origin of human consciousness... was the third... Life became aware of itself, and began to transform the world of nature to its own ends.

Natural selection operates according to immediate circumstances and not toward a long-term goal. Homo sapiens did eventually evolve as a descendent of the first humans, but there was nothing inevitable about it.

Ever since Darwin tied knots between human beings and the rest of the animal world, many people have frantically attempted to untie them again, declaring that even though our roots are in the animal world we have left them so far behind as to make any comparisons utterly meaningless. To some extent this is true, because the quality that makes us unique in the biological kingdom is the enormous capacity to learn.