Evolutionary Origins Quotes & Sayings

Regularity, order, desire for perfection destroy art. Irregularity is the basis of all art. — Pierre-Auguste Renoir

I do agree with Stich that a quick move from our evolutionary origins to the reliability of our cognitive mechanisms is not legitimate. As I see it, the case for the reliability or unreliability of various cognitive mechanisms lies elsewhere. — Hilary Kornblith

Nesse's research focuses on the evolutionary origins of depression. Why does depression exist at all? If it's stayed in our gene pool for so long, he argues, there must be some evolutionary benefit. Nesse believes that depression may be an adaptive mechanism meant to prevent us from falling victim to blind optimism - and squandering resources on the wrong goals.11 It's to our evolutionary advantage not to waste time and energy on goals we can't realistically achieve. And so when we have no clear way to make productive progress, our neurological systems default to a state of low energy ... — Jane McGonigal

Say little and do much, and receive all men with a cheerful countenance — The Talmud

Darwinism gives no moral guidelines about how we should live or how doctors should practice medicine. A Darwinian perspective on medicine can, however, help us to understand the evolutionary origins of disease, and this knowledge will prove profoundly useful in achieving the legitimate goals of medicine. — Randolph M. Nesse

Deutsch and her colleagues, in their 2006 paper, suggested that their work not only has "implications for the issues of modularity in the processing of speech and music ... [but] of the evolutionary origin" of both. In particular, they see absolute pitch, whatever its subsequent vicissitudes, as having been crucial to the origins of both speech and music. In his book The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body, Steven Mithen takes this idea further, suggesting that music and language have a common origin, and that a sort of combined protomusic-cum-protolanguage was characteristic of the Neanderthal mind. — Oliver Sacks

Physical evolution, so reason cannot be explained as a mere extension or complication of consciousness. To explain our rationality will require something in addition to what is needed to explain our consciousness and its evidently adaptive forms, something at a different level. Reason can take us beyond the appearances because it has completely general validity, rather than merely local utility. If we have it, we recognize that it can be neither confirmed nor undermined by a theory of its evolutionary origins, nor by — Thomas Nagel

Bodies are strange. Some people have real problems with the stuff that goes on inside them. You find out that inside someone you know there's just mucus and meat and slime and bone. They menstruate, salivate, defecate and cry. You know? Sometimes it can just kill the romance. You know that? — Neil Gaiman

On the contrary, every civilized human being, however high his conscious development, is still an archaic man at the deeper levels of his psyche. Just as the human body connects us with the mammals and displays numerous vestiges of earlier evolutionary stages going back even to the reptilian age, so the human psyche is a product of evolution which, when followed back to its origins, shows countless archaic traits. — C. G. Jung

I got my first camera when I was 21 - my boyfriend gave it to me for my birthday - but at that point politics was my life, and I viewed the camera as a tool for expressing my political beliefs rather than as an art medium. — Carrie Mae Weems

The chemical differences among various species and genera of animals and plants are certainly as significant for the history of their origins as the differences in form. If we could define clearly the differences in molecular constitution and functions of different kinds of organisms, there would be possible a more illuminating and deeper understanding of question of the evolutionary reactions of organisms than could ever be expected from morphological considerations. — Ray Lankester

It is my conviction that if any professional biologist will take adequate time to examine carefully the assumptions upon which the macro-evolution doctrine rests, and the observational and laboratory evidence that bears on the problem of origins, he/she will conclude that there are substantial reasons for doubting the truth of this doctrine. Moreover, I believe that a scientifically sound creationist view of origins is not only possible, but it is to be preferred over the evolutionary one. — Dean H. Kenyon

The fact that we have been able to develop a successful science, which issues in ever more accurate predictions and broader explanations, is the real ground for confidence that we are in a position to gain knowledge of the world around us. At the same time, one might ask how it is that the cognitive equipment we have came about, and here, no doubt, our evolutionary origins are relevant. — Hilary Kornblith

The evolutionary explanation for origins, although impossible either to prove or to test scientifically, is nevertheless defended by its proponents on the basis that it is the only explanation which is naturalistic, not involving the 'supernatural' element of a divine Creator. — Henry M. Morris

A library is thought in cold storage. — Herbert Samuel

She kept giving it so her took even more and Jesus, the taste of her, the feel of her pressed close, the world melted away. It was more intoxicating that any liquor, a high better than any fucking drug.
Phenomenal.
Better than he would have guessed. Better than years of wondering how good it could be.
The best he ever had.
With just a fucking kiss. — Kristen Ashley

Winning the Origins Lottery Nontheistic models adhere to a central premise that humans arose by strictly natural unguided steps from a bacterial life-form that sprang into being 3.8 billion years ago. Famed evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala, an advocate for the hypothesis that natural selection and mutations can efficiently generate distinctly different species, nevertheless calculated the probability that humans (or a similarly intelligent species) arose from single-celled organisms as a possibility so small (10-1,000,000) that it might as well be zero (roughly equivalent to the likelihood of winning the California lottery 150,000 consecutive times with the purchase of just one ticket each time).2 He and other evolutionary biologists agree that natural selection and mutations could have yielded any of a virtually infinite number of other outcomes. Astrophysicists Brandon Carter, John Barrow, and Frank Tipler produced an even smaller probability. — Hugh Ross

Most students are presented only with the evolutionary belief system in their schools, and they are censored from hearing challenges to it. Let our young people understand science correctly and hear both sides of the origins issue and then evaluate them. — Ken Ham

I have always lived in a world in which I'm just a spot in history. My life is not the important point. I'm just part of the continuum, and that continuum, to me, is a marvelous thing. The history of life, and the history of the planet, should go on and on and on and on. I cannot conceive of anything in the universe that has more meaning than that.
[Sheri S. Tepper: Speaking to the Universe, Locus Magazine, September 1998] — Sheri S. Tepper

The importance of awakening to our evolutionary origins is paramount because irrational ideas about "who we are" fuel our sense of separateness — Christopher Zzenn Loren