Evolved Body Quotes & Sayings

Though it accounts for only 2 percent of the body's mass, it uses up a fifth of all the oxygen we breathe, and it's where a quarter of all our glucose gets burned. The brain is the most energetically expensive piece of equipment in our body, and has been ruthlessly honed by natural selection to be efficient at the tasks for which it evolved. One might say that the whole point of our nervous system, from the sensory organs that feed information to the glob of neurons that interprets it, is to develop a sense of what is happening in the present and what will happen in the future, so that we can respond in the best possible way. Strip away the emotions, the philosophizing, the neuroses, and the dreams, and our brains, in the most reductive sense, are fundamentally prediction and planning machines. — Joshua Foer

Even though this deity (the Christian God with a capital "G") has evolved through its 2000 years, it somehow maintains in its current version all old characteristics, whether conflicting or consistent: readiness to punish but ability to heal, vindictiveness yet forgiveness, utter cruelty to outside nonbelievers but looking for converts, etc. — Thomas Daniel Nehrer

The abode of the spirits are astral world and earth land counterparts. In the path of evolution, the soul is futile. You need a body to unfold consciousness. — Usha Cosmico

One day I realized that I no longer dreamed of what I would do when I was whole again. My will burned to reach that point, and then suddenly was nothing. I had become nothing more than my desire to fly. I had adjusted, somehow. I had evolved in that unfamiliar region, plodding my stolid way to where the scientists and Remakers of the world congregated. The means had become the end. If I regained my wings, I would become someone new, without the desire that defined me. I saw in that spring damp as I walked endlessly north that I was not looking for fulfilment but for dissolution. I would pass my body on to a newborn, and rest. — China Mieville

A distinct germ line maintains continuity from generation to generation, regardless of what happens to the rest of the body. In this way, a body can be seen as a temporary structure that enables the germ line to fulfill its fundamental task of reproduction in each generation. Evolutionary biology therefore has a convincing answer to that age-old conundrum: "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" The egg, of course, came first. Chickens, like people, evolved so that one egg could lead to another. — Robert Martin

Similarly, thought is a system. That system not only includes thought and feelings, but it includes the state of the body; it includes the whole of society - as thought is passing back and forth between people in a process by which thought evolved from ancient times. — David Bohm

Of course, dopamine didn't evolve for crossing arbitrary lines on the ground. It evolved to release energy when you're about to meet a survival need. If an ape climbs a high tree for a delicious mango, dopamine spurts as he nears the reward. That tells his body to release the reserve tank of energy, which helps him do what it takes to meet his needs. He doesn't say "I did it!" in words, but neurochemicals create that feeling without need for words. — Loretta Graziano Breuning

Where are we going? We're going to try and fulfill Dr. Martin Luther King's dream, and if we Mexican Americans march to Washington, it is to tell this country that poverty is not a Negro problem. Poverty is a Mexican-American problem; poverty is an American-Indian problem; poverty is a Puerto Rican problem; poverty is an Appalachian problem. — Rodolfo Gonzalez Lebrero

What is required is faith. Man has body, life and mind but that is not all that constitutes man. He has risen to the mind as a result of evolution. Now a higher consciousness will be evolved - this I call Supermind. It is the instrument of the Divine Consciousness, the Truth-Consciousness. — Sri Aurobindo

Nature is very clear on this. In fact, there's one fundamental law that all of nature obeys that mankind breaks everyday. Now this is a law that's evolved over billions of years and the law is this: nothing in nature takes more than it needs. A redwood tree doesn't take all of the soil's nutrients, just what it needs to grow. A lion doesn't kill every gazelle, just one. We have a term for something in the body when it takes more than its share. We call it cancer. — Tom Shadyac

So what if man's body evolved from the monkeys? Whether he came from monkeys or fish is unimportant. The important idea is that when the body became "human" enough, the first human soul slipped into it. — Garth Stein

I'm with a man who's evolved enough to look at my body and see it as more beautiful because of the journey it has taken. — Angelina Jolie

As this body of knowledge has evolved, a much more critical job for researchers and scientists has evolved into explaining and educating policy makers and the public to the risks of global warming and the possible consequences of action or of no action. — John Olver

The human mind evolved always in the company of the human body, and of the animal body before it was human. The intricate connections of mind and body must exceed our imagination, as from our point of view we are peculiarly prevented from observing them. — John Desmond Bernal

The software programs that make our body run ... were evolved in very different times. We'd like to actually change those programs. One little software program, called the fat insulin receptor gene, basically says, 'Hold onto every calorie, because the next hunting season may not work out so well.' That was in the interests of the species tens of thousands of years ago. We'd like to turn that program off. — Ray Kurzweil

I have now transformed into a sensitive; a person who is able to detect when spirits are present. It's a skill that's evolved over hundreds of paranormal investigations and has taught me that the human body is the best means of paranormal detection. I've become a fine-tuned instrument of spiritual sensitivity. — Zak Bagans

It's perfectly possible to enjoy a good, civilized, person-to-person conversation with a picture on a museum wall. Talk to it, listen carefully, and it will more than likely talk back to you. — Peter Clothier

The body is a very low level machine language. The language of the soul, of the mind, is much more evolved. — Frederick Lenz

Simply being born female in our society is to grow up being told your worth as a person is tied to how slim and attractive you are. Even for those of us lucky enough to have evolved parents, the message is still driven home by the world at large. — Padma Lakshmi

In all warm-blooded creatures, which are the highest evolved and have feelings, passions and emotions, which reach outward into the world with desire, which may be said to really live in the fuller meaning of the term and not merely vegetate - in all such creatures, the currents of the desire body flow outward from the liver. — Max Heindel

Our body's evolutionary journey is also far from over. Natural selection didn't stop when farming started but instead has continued and continues to adapt populations to changing diets, germs, and environments. Yet the rate and power of cultural evolution has vastly outpaced the rate and power of natural selection, and the bodies we inherited are still adapted to a significant extent to the various and diverse environmental conditions in which we evolved over millions of years. The end product of all that evolution is that we are big-brained, moderately fat bipeds who reproduce relatively rapidly but take a long time to mature. — Daniel E. Lieberman

Both vitamin pills and vegetables are loaded with essential nutrients, but not in the same combinations. Spinach is a good source of both vitamin C and iron. As it happens, vitamin C boosts iron absorption, allowing the body to take in more of it than if the mineral were introduced alone. When I first started studying nutrition, I became fascinated with these coincidences, realizing of course they're not coincidences. Human bodies and their complex digestive chemistry evolved over millenia in response to all the different foods
mostly plants
they raised or gathered from the land surrounding them. They may have died young from snakebite or blunt trauma, but they did not have diet-related illnesses like heart disease and Type II diabetes that are prevalent in our society now, even in some young adults and children. [from an entry by Barbara Kingsolver's daughter Camille] — Barbara Kingsolver

Two chemicals called actin and myosin evolved eons ago to allow the muscles in insect wings to contract and relax. Thus, insects learned to fly. When one of those paired molecules are absent, wings will grow but they cannot flap and are therefore useless. Today, the same two proteins are responsible for the beating of the human heart, and when one is absent, the person's heartbeat is inefficient and weak, ultimately leading to heart failure.
Again, science marvels at the way molecules adapt over millions of years, but isn't there a deeper intent? In our hearts, we feel the impulse to fly, to break free of boundaries. Isn't that the same impulse nature expressed when insects began to take flight? The prolactin that generates milk in a mother's breast is unchanged from the prolactin that sends salmon upstream to breed, enabling them to cross from saltwater to fresh. — Deepak Chopra

My last chance had vanished into itself like a snail coiling up into his shell.
Insidiously I had lost my grip, and now this was it. I thought all this without much emotion. I really didn't care anymore. I couldn't hang on anymore. I didn't have the guts to kill myself, but I didn't want it to continue. I walked a couple of blocks, empty, listless, and wished I could cry.
... The diabolic hope, the purposeful pulsing of blood, the flight into coherence allowed for some rationalizing an afterlife. A new theology was evolving, one that had a faith-in-death clause. It was evolved when I kicked a dead waterbug on the pavement. It was dried out, hollowed, emptied, like some kind of shell. Maybe, I thought, its body is a shell, maybe all bodies are shells. We hatch and die. Our spirit or something like that is the yoke: it lives the real life, the true life.
It wasn't comforting. — Arthur Nersesian

The great passions had never been moved by a perfect body but by an evolved mind. — Merce Cardus

Why is The Origin of Species such a great book? First of all, because it convincingly demonstrates the fact of evolution: it provides a vast and well-chosen body of evidence showing that existing animals and plants cannot have been separately created in their present forms, but must have evolved from earlier forms by slow transformation. And secondly, because the theory of natural selection, which the Origin so fully and so lucidly expounds, provides a mechanism by which such transformation could and would automatically be produced. — Charles Darwin

Humans are built to move. We evolved under conditions that required daily intense physical activity, and even among individuals with lower physical potential, that hard-earned genotype is still ours today. The modern sedentary lifestyle leads to the inactivation of the genes related to physical performance, attributes that were once critical for survival and which are still critical for the correct, healthy expression of the genotype. The genes are still there, they just aren't doing anything because the body is not stressed enough to cause a physiological adaptation requiring their activation. The sedentary person's heart, lungs, muscles, bones, nerves and brain all operate far below the level at which they evolved to function, and at which they still function best. — Mark Rippetoe

Far as to say that white-skinned people are actually black-skinned mutants who lost the ability to produce significant amounts of eumelanin. Redheads, with their characteristic milky white skin and freckles, may be a further mutation along the same lines. In order to survive in places with infrequent and weak sunlight, such as in parts of the U.K., they may have evolved in a way that almost completely knocked out their body's ability to produce eumelanin, the brown or black pigment. — Sharon Moalem

I began to read the Holy Scriptures upon my knees, laying aside all other books, and praying over, if possible, every line and word. This proved meat indeed and drink indeed to my soul. I daily received fresh life, light and power from above. — George Whitefield

The planetary perspective provides a kind of out of body experience for us - hovering in orbit and watching ourselves sleepwalk through a slow disaster of our own making. Now, can this experience help us to shake ourselves awake? For virtually all of its history Earth has evolved without us, and we have always seen ourselves as autonomous actors on a passive planetary backdrop. But now we are beginning to see that our futures - those of humanity and of planet Earth - are tightly conjoined. If human civilization is to persist and thrive we will need a completely different view of our planet, and of ourselves, in which we acknowledge both our deep dependence and our increasing influence. — David Grinspoon

When you have a better image of yourself physically, you have a tendency to live your life in a more positive way. — Jeff Olson

While you sit
Like a rain puddle in hell
Knitting the socks
Of your life. — Charles Simic

To keep your he-man jaw muscles from smashing your precious teeth, the only set you have, the body evolved an automated braking system faster and more sophisticated than anything on a Lexus. The jaw knows its own strength. The faster and more recklessly you close your mouth, the less force the muscles are willing to apply. — Mary Roach