Human Mutation Quotes & Sayings

I don't remember the first image of a werewolf I saw, but I suspect it was the hybrid type, up on two legs, with long limbs, hair, claw-like fingernails and lupine head. To me there's nothing scary about complete transformation from human into wolf. Wolves aren't scary. They're dangerous, yes, but so are geese, in the wrong mood. What's scary is seeing the human in the wolf but knowing it's beyond the reach of reason or emotional appeal. That's where the horror and dread kicks in. — Glen Duncan

Yes, thought the Count, the world does spin. In fact, it spins on its axis even as it revolves around the sun. And the galaxy turns as well, a wheel within a greater wheel, producing a chime of an entirely different nature than that of a tiny hammer in a clock. And when that celestial chime sounds, perhaps a mirror will suddenly serve its truer purpose - revealing to a man not who he imagines himself to be, but who he has become. — Amor Towles

I do have the ability to explore life and to be over the moon at the smallest thing - a few pints and a craic in the pub and I'm in heaven. But I have a melancholy side to me as well. Acting allows me to feel things, it kind of buys me human experience. And I don't mean this as acting as higher cause, because it's not, but it does kind of have a higher awareness emotionally. — Colin Farrell

It is a rule in paleontology that ornamentation and complication precede extinction. And our mutation, of which the assembly line, the collective farm, the mechanized army, and the mass production of food are evidences or even symptoms, might well correspond to the thickening armor of the great reptiles - a tendency that can end only in extinction. If this should happen to be true, nothing stemming from thought can interfere with it or bend it. Conscious thought seems to have little effect on the action or direction of our species. — John Steinbeck

At least 15 percent of human females possess a genetic mutation that gives them an extra (fourth) type of color photoreceptor - and this allows them to discriminate between colors that look identical to the majority of us with a mere three types of color photoreceptors. — David Eagleman

The Moon shows us only one side of its face and there is no man on Earth who can succeed this! Every man's other face has its time to be seen! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

The differences you perceive between Humans - between groups of Humans - are the result of isolation and inbreeding, mutation, and adaptation to different Earth environments — Octavia E. Butler

What are humans meant to do; why are we here? Are we a mutation on the earth destroying its host? Are we a cancer destined to kill what supports us? I think not. So exploring this question is a powerful exercise in meaning; what is the meaning of human existence? — David W. Earle

Universally accepted, microevolution has limits for what it can explain. These limits do not reach the center where the controversy lies - the Thesis of Common Ancestry was popularized by Charles Darwin. Darwin believed that the world we see today has come to us through an evolutionary process called natural selection. Through genetic mutation, species adapt and develop because the strongest of a species will survive and pass on their DNA to their successors. Macroevolution is the belief that all development - from the first moments of the universe, the formation of stars and planets, to the eventual emergence of simple bacteria, to the most complex human being is explainable through this naturalistic transformational process. — Jon Morrison

Sometimes you need a little crisis to get your adrenaline flowing and help you realize your potential. — Jeannette Walls

I worked the Giants win over the Texans earlier this season. The Giants ran the heck out of the ball. Eli Manning rolled out away from Watt just about every time and changed the release point on his passes. The Cowboys have a road map. — Dan Fouts

You're only delaying the inevitable. I have the Tacitus. I am invincible. The Tacitus told me of Tiberium missiles, of invulnerable flying ships, of real-time genetic mutation. More than alien. More than human! The next step in our evolution as a species! — Kane

I know that the human condition will be radically changed through technical means. Much of this change will be painful, monstrous and horrible. Most mutations are disgusting failures, most experiments are failures. I accept this and I don't find it frightening. — Bruce Sterling

Education should be a lifelong process, the formal period serving as a foundation on which life's structure may rest and rise. — Robert H. Jackson

I declare that The Beatles are mutants. Prototypes of evolutionary agents sent by God, endowed with a mysterious power to create a new human species, a young race of laughing freemen. — Timothy Leary

Much like Down Syndrome, red hair is a genetic mutation, and it occurs when a human has unprotected sex with a clown. — Daniel Tosh

The problem with Ebola is that it makes mistakes while it copies itself. The mistakes are actually good for Ebola because they help Ebola change, and as a result of this, as it jumps from one human body to the next, roughly half the time, it's got a mutation. — Richard Preston

I feel that the change, the mutation in consciousness, will occur spontaneously once certain pressures now in operation are removed. I feel that the principal instrument of monopoly and control that prevents expansion of consciousness is the word lines controlling thought, feeling and apparent sensory impressions of the human host. — William S. Burroughs

Julian is bluff and sturdy, royal; he possesses a gracefully muscular, equine beauty so natural it suggests that beauty itself is a fundamental human condition and not a mutation in the general design. — Michael Cunningham

I was blessed to look well and retain a youthful look but that was just genes. I was disappointed when critics started pointing out my wrinkles. I thought, you mean this is what it's gonna be about now? I'm not going to be permitted to be human? — Robert Redford

It has something to do with the cosmic rays coming from outer space. They strike some person or thing, and then you get a mutation - like the stripes on a zebra.
The attraction of two such mutants to one another would have an almost incestuous appeal and be far stronger than the bond of love between ordinary human beings. — Anna Kavan

Quantum mechanics says that it is completely correct to say that the universe's
evolution is determined not by how it started in the Big Bang, but by the final
state of the universe. Every stage of universal history, including every stage of logical and human history, is determined by the ultimate goal of the universe. And
if I am correct that the universal final state is indeed God, then every stage of universal
history, in particular every mutation that has ever occurred, or ever will occur
in any living being, is determined by the action of God. — Frank J. Tipler

The day I bought my cane, I realized
I was through with the burden of feet. Instead,
I am going to become a mermaid.
I have always liked the ocean, the promise
of depth. I am tired of this dry world,
all of this dust and sickness, these barren fields.
I want to dive without drowning. I want to kiss sharks.
I want men to carve me into the bows of their ships
like a prayer, before I lure them into the depths
with my fishnet mouth. I want the beauty,
the gorgeous mutation, the fairytale of half body.
All the wisdom of a woman, without the failures of sex.
I am plunging. I am not coming up for air.
I do not want all this human,
my legs move like they resent being legs,
my body is wrecked by all this gravity.
I cannot face another morning waking up
with no hope of a fairytale. Here on land,
I am always drowning. Here on land,
I cannot move. — Clementine Von Radics

Because the light of evolution is not instantaneous or blinding, it is difficult to visualize the immensely slow and gradual change that is brought about by mutation and natural selection. When you consider a protozoan cell or an amphibian, on the one hand, and dolphins or, say, commuters, on the other, there is no intuitive way to make sense of the line that runs from one form of life to the next.

The popular cartoon of evolution, where the ape slowly unbends, straightens up, starts walking, and mutates into some form of modern-day human, is probably the easiest way to think about it. But [...] this caricature is misleading. Evolution does not follow the course of a single line. The tree of life bristles with stems, boughs, and branches. Most lines from one form to another are densely surrounded by branches leading to different species or dead ends. — Christine Kenneally

Our lack of community is intensely painful. A TV talk show is not community. A couple of hours in a church pew each Sabbath is not community. A multinational corporation is neither a human nor a community, and in the sweatshops, defiled agribusiness fields, genetic mutation labs, ecological dead zones, the inhumanity is showing. Without genuine spiritual community, life becomes a struggle so lonely and grim that even Hillary Clinton has admitted "it takes a village". — David James Duncan

It's not human. It's not primal. So we don't understand it. It's a more recent mutation. The things we all have, love and hate and passion, and the need to eat and yell and screw, these are things every human has. But there's this new mutation, this ability to stand between a human being and some small measure of justice and blame it on some regulation. To say that the form was filled out incorrectly. — Dave Eggers

Why has time disappeared in our culture? How is it that after decades of inventions and new technologies devoted to saving time and labor, the result is that there is no time left? We are a time-poor society; we are temporally impoverished. And there is no issue, no aspect of human life, that exceeds this in importance. The destruction of time is literally the destruction of life. — Jacob Needleman

Adaption of the human body in space is not yet mastered. As soon as you hit space, you feel your body is going through a period of mutation. There's no blood in your head; you have a hard time swallowing. We're not born to naturally be in space. — Guy Laliberte

Random mutations much more easily debilitate genes than improve them, and that this is true even of the helpful mutations. Let me emphasize, our experience with malaria's effects on humans (arguably our most highly studied genetic system) shows that most helpful mutations degrade genes. What's more, as a group the mutations are incoherent, meaning that they are not adding up to some new system. They are just small changes - mostly degradative - in pre-existing, unrelated genes. The take-home lesson is that this is certainly not the kind of process we would expect to build the astonishingly elegant machinery of the cell. If random mutation plus selective pressure substantially trashes the human genome, why should we think that it would be a constructive force in the long term? There is no reason to think so. — Michael J. Behe

In 1962 the president of the American Historical Association, Carl Bridenbaugh, warned his colleagues that human existence was undergoing a "Great Mutation" - so sudden and so radical "that we are now suffering something like historical amnesia." He lamented the decline of reading; the distancing from nature (which he blamed in part on "ugly yellow Kodak boxes" and "the transistor radio everywhere"); and the loss of shared culture. — James Gleick

Freedom is not won by merely overthrowing a tyrannical ruler or an oppressive regime. That is usually only the prelude to a new tyranny, a new oppression. — Jonathan Sacks

If you are there to staunch the tears of the world, then it does not cross your mind that you yourself may weep. — Alexander McCall Smith

Let us accept the possibility that there is, at death, not an abrupt cessation of energy, rather a dispersal. This seems more than reasonable to me. Mind you, I've owned a series of old cars, and Im used to turning off the motor only to experience a series of rumblings and explosions that would shame many a volcano. This is the sort of thing I'm conceptualizing, a kind of clunky running-on. And just as some cars are more susceptible to this behavior, so people vary in the length of time, and the force with which, their energy sputters and gasps ... My example is overly dramatic, but it is not wholly unreasonable, and it serves to make this genetic mutation a player at the evolutionary table. You see what I'm getting at: a biologically and evolutionally sound model for the soul. (I didn't say I'd achieved it.) Let's conceive of the soul as an aura that human beings wear on their backs, cumberson as a tortoise's carapace. Some are larger than others. — Paul Quarrington

Only cells that had been transformed by a virus or a genetic mutation had the potential to become immortal. — Rebecca Skloot

At this point, godless materialists might be cheering. If humans evolved strictly by mutation and natural selection, who needs God to explain us? To this, I reply: I do. The comparison of chimp and human sequences, interesting as it is, does not tell us what it means to be human. In my views, DNA sequence alone, even if accompanied by a vast trove of data on biological function, will never explain certain special human attributes, such as the knowledge of the Moral Law and the universal search for God. Freeing God from the burden of special acts of creation does not remove Him as the source of the things that make humanity special, and of the universe itself. It merely shows us something of how He operates. — Francis S. Collins

By ignoring our health and consuming unhealthy products, we are unknowingly contributing to the genetic mutation of the human species. — Joseph P. Kauffman

We are surrounded by the absurd excess of the universe. By meaningless bulk, vastness without size, power without consequence. The stubborn iteration that is present without being felt. Nothing the spirit can marry. Merely phenomenon and its physics. An endless, endless of going on. No habitat where the brain can recognize itself. No pertinence for the heart. Helpless duplication. — Jack Gilbert

We've now become the spectators of our own mutation.
We may not die human anymore.
But what makes us human? — Natasha Tsakos