From an evolutionary standpoint, human consciousness has not been around very long. A little light just went on after four and a half billion years. How often does that happen? Maybe it is quite rare.
In fact, death seems to have been a rather late invention in evolution. One can go a long way in evolution before encountering an authentic corpse.
To say that it all came about 6,000 years ago is just nonsense, and I think it's time we come off of that stuff and say this isn't possible
Despite a full century of scientific insights attesting to the antiquity of the earth, more than half of our neighbors believe that the entire cosmos was created six thousand years ago. This is, incidentally, about a thousand years after the Sumerians invented glue.
You'd have to be deaf, dumb, and blind to think that this earth that we live in only has 6000 years of existence. It just doesn't.
In terms of evolutionary history, it was only yesterday that men learned to walk around on two legs and get in trouble thinking complicated thoughts. So don't worry, you'll burn out.
Life existed on Earth for nearly four billion years before anything remotely resembling a human being showed up. And even then, when we started to branch off from other apes about 10,000,000 years ago, our ancestors looked pretty different.
A knowledge of the true age of the Earth and of the fossil record makes it impossible for any balanced intellect to believe in the literal truth of every part of the Bible in the way that fundamentalists do.
It took nature 100 million years to make the ape stand up and become Homo sapiens. It took us only 10,000 to make knowing obsolete.
We are just a blip. I found it very interesting when Clive [Oppenheimer] interviewed the Ethiopian scientists and asked them, "Do we have another 100,000 years?" In their calculation, mankind will be entering a very critical phrase a thousand years from now.
In the 40,000 year time scale we're all the same people. We're all equally primitive, give or take two or three thousand years here or a hundred years there.
People say life begins at conception, I say life began about a billion years ago and it's a continuous process.
Just to settle it once and for all: Which came first, the chicken or the egg? The egg, laid by a bird that was not a chicken.
Molecular evidense suggests that our common ancestor with the chimpanzees lived, in Africa, between 5 and 7 million years ago, say half a million generations ago. This is not long by evolutionary standards.
Scientists are complaining that the new dinosaur movie shows dinosaurs with lemurs, who didn't evolve for another million years. They're afraid the movie will give kids a mistaken impression. What about the fact that the dinosaurs are singing and dancing?
The human race is just getting started.... The cerebral cortex is only a hundred thousand years old. It's still a baby, sucking teat and eating Cheerios. We might get better, maybe even wise, if we can last another thousand years.
