Evolution - Quotes
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.
Whatever relationships you have attracted in your life at this moment, are precisely the ones you need in your life at this moment. There is a hidden meaning behind all events, and this hidden meaning is serving your own evolution.
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.
It`s things like Wikipedia that help us to advance as a society and help us to accelerate our evolution. If you`re a researcher and you need some answer to something, and in today`s world you can find it this quickly, it allows you to develop whatever you are doing much faster.
In art there are only fast or slow developments. Essentially it is a matter of evolution, not revolution.
Our fear of death seems to me to be an error of evolution. Many animals react instinctively with terror and flight at the approach of a predator. It is a healthy reaction, one that allows them to escape from danger. But it`s a terror that lasts an instant, not something that remains with them constantly. Natural selection has produced these big apes with hypertrophic frontal lobes, with an exaggerated ability to predict the future. It`s a prerogative that`s certainly useful but one that has placed before us a vision of our inevitable death, and this triggers the instinct of terror and flight. Basically, I believe that the fear of death is the result of an accidental and clumsy interference between two distinct evolutionary pressures - the product of bad automatic connections in our brain rather than something that has any use or meaning.
Evolution has no long-term goal. There is no long-distance target, no final perfection to serve as a criterion for selection, although human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution.
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 designed by evolution to be "informavores", epistemically hungry seekers of information, in an endless quest to improve our purchase on the world, the better to make decisions about our subjectively open future.
If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone has ever had, I'd give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton and Einstein and everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law.
Evolution is something that happens, willy-nilly, in spite of all the efforts of the replicators (and nowadays of the genes) to prevent it happening.
Evolution is a process that depends on amplifying things that almost never happen.