Biology Quotes
Every living thing is, from the cosmic perspective, incredibly lucky simply to be alive. Most, 90 percent and more, of all the organisms that have ever lived have died without viable offspring, but not a single one of your ancestors, going back to the dawn of life on Earth, suffered that normal misfortune. You spring from an unbroken line of winners going back millions of generations, and those winners were, in every generation, the luckiest of the lucky, one out of a thousand or even a million. So however unlucky you may be on some occasion today, your presence on the planet testifies to the role luck has played in your past.
It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.
Instinct is a marvellous thing, [...] It can neither be explained nor ignored.
You can never pinpoint the exact moment that a species came to be, because it never did. Just like how you used to be a baby and now you're older, but there was no single day when you went to bed young and woke up old. (...) There was no first human. It sounds like a paradox, it sounds like it breaks the whole theory of evolution, but it's really a key to truly understanding how evolution works. Evolution happens like a movie, with frames moving by both quickly and gradually, and we often can't see the change while it's occurring. Every time we find a fossil, it's a snapshot back in time, often with thousands of frames missing in between, and we're forced to reconstruct the whole film. Life is what happens in between the snapshots. Instead of a nice smooth road this is a journey on stepping stones and we give each one their own name.
Sometimes our body`s signals get messed up and our failsafe goes haywire. Instead of making clots, our body destroys them. And the thing that`s supposed to help us only hurts us. It means we start to bleed and everything shuts down.
Evolution is all about processes that almost never happen. Every birth in every lineage is a potential speciation event, but speciation almost never happens, not once in a million births. Mutation in DNA almost never happens - not once in a trillion copyings - but evolution depends on it. Take the set of infrequent accidents - things that almost never happen - and sort them into the happy accidents, the neutral accidents, and the fatal accidents; amplify the effects of the happy accidents - which happens automatically when you have replication and competition - and you get evolution.
Not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares.
Living organisms had existed on earth, without ever knowing why, for over three thousand million years before the truth finally dawned on one of them. His name was Charles Darwin.
I believe I have found the missing link between animal and civilized man. It is us.
When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with its fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.
It is almost as if the human brain were specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism, and to find it hard to believe.
We don`t love babies and puppies because they`re cute. It`s the other way around: we see them as cute because evolution has designed us to love things that look like that.
We are survival machines - robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.