Nicholas A. Christakis Quotes

When I am at a dinner table, I love to ask everybody, 'How long do you think our species might last?' I've read that the average age of a species, of any species, is about two million years. Is it possible we can have an average life span as a species? And do you picture us two million years more or a million and a half years, or 5,000?

I do definitely believe that there is life away from this planet. I mean, we've kind of established that with the fact that we found bacteria on meteorites, and we've kind of used that to backtrack and show how this Earth, this planet, could have formed the ability to sustain life in the first place.

Life exists throughout the cosmos and is a consequence of matter in the universe.

In the future, I can imagine that we will genetically modify ourselves using the genes that have doubled our life span since we were chimpanzees.

The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.

Man's biological weakness is the condition of human culture.

There is no doubt: the study of man is just beginning, at the same time that his end is in sight.

We have decommissioned natural selection and must now look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become.

The most profound change that genetics brings about might not be scientific at all. It might be mental and even spiritual enrichment: a more expansive sense of who we humans are, existentially, and where we came from, and how we fit with other life on earth.

Our school systems teach the children that they are nothing but glorified apes who are evolutionized out of some primordial soup of mud.

Whether man is a product of evolution or is 'created' becomes the question, 'Who is man? Is he part of the world or something different from it?'

Eventually we'll be able to sequence the human genome and replicate how nature did intelligence in a carbon-based system.

The body is just a rooming house.

What I see in science is a lot of imagination referring to things that are fundamental to what we are. Our cells, our history, our future, our place in the universe, our lack of place in the universe. That's poetry as far as I'm concerned.

I still see life entirely through its Darwinian prism. I keep trying to shake off the aftereffects of writing 'The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead', and I find I can't.

All human beings have bodies. All bodies are mortal. Yours, too, is one of these bodies.

The logical outcome of evolution is that it makes monsters. We turn into monsters because evolution takes away everything that makes us human in the sense of our moral accountability, our moral absolutes, and our idea of being distinct from the animal kingdom.

We live in this miraculous technological environment, and yet our human behaviour is still governed by basic impulses from prehistoric times.

If, presume not to God to scan; The proper study of Mankind is Man. Plac'd on this isthmus of a middle state, a being darkly wise, and rudely great.

Where do we come from? What are We? Where are we going?

We were all born of flesh, in a flare of pain. We do not remember the red roots whence we rose, but we know that we rose and walked, that after a while we shall lie down again.

I believe that man is the product of natural evolution that is born from the conflict of being a prisoner and separated from nature, and from the need to find unity and harmony with it.

However incoherent a human existence may be, human unity is not bothered by it.

We do not choose survival as a value, it chooses us.

Homo sapiens, the first truly free species, is about to decommission natural selection, the force that made us. Soon we must look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become.