Human Evolution Quotes

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.

Humans are an infant species, a mere 150,000 years old. But, armed with a massive brain, we've not only survived, we've used our wits to adapt to and flourish in habitats as varied as deserts, Arctic tundra, tropical rainforests, wetlands and high mountain ranges.

In the entire history of the human species, every tool we've invented has been to expand muscle power. All except one. The integrated circuit, the computer. That lets us use our brain power.

Science, which has transformed the material world, gives man the power of transforming himself.

The only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man.

We're going to merge with machines and become gods, but first, we've got to reduce the world population 90 percent.

As man now is, God once was; as God is now man may be.

Your highest thought, however, ye shall have it commanded unto you by me - and it is this: man is something that is to be surpassed.

Specialization is for insects... The race of man? He's a whole other creature.

We've got paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technologies.

The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.

I conclude that the musical notes and rhythms were first acquired by the male or female progenitors of mankind for the sake of charming the opposite sex.

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

With highly civilized nations, continued progress depends in a subordinate degree on natural selection; for such nations do not supplant and exterminate one another as do savage tribes. Nevertheless the more intelligent members within the same community will succeed better in the long run than the inferior, and leave a more numerous progeny, and this is a form of natural selection.

As civilization advances, man grows unconscious of the primitive elements of life; he is separated from them by his perfection of material techniques.

There was an idea that God created man different from other animals, because man was rational and animals had drives and instincts. That idea of a rational man that was specially created went out the window when Darwin showed that we evolved from animal ancestors, that we have instincts, much as do animals, and that our instincts are very important. It was a much more sophisticated, nuanced, and rich view of the human mind.

History is not merely a procession of people in fancy dress fighting wars. It is crucially the story of man's evolution from grunting cave dweller to serious thinker, from cruelly retributive law to merciful law, from casual barbarism to care and compassion.

What would it be like to live 500 years? Healthy years, of course; no one wants to live 500 years in a coma on a respirator. But reasonably healthy all that time? That would be awesome!

We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves to exist in this new environment.

The chimpanzees' closest relative is not the gorilla but humans.

Make no more giants, God!But elevate the race at once!

There is another very specific quality which distinguishes them [man from animals], and which will admit of no dispute. This is the faculty of self-improvement, which, by the help of circumstances, gradually develops all the rest of our faculties, and is inherent in the species as in the individual: whereas a brute is, at the end of a few months, all he will ever be during his whole life, and his species, at the end of a thousand years, exactly what it was the first year of that thousand.

I think we're going to move from a Homo sapiens into a Homo evolutis:... a hominid that takes direct and deliberate control over the evolution of his species, her species and other species.

At some time in their careers, most good historians itch to write a history of the world, endeavor to discover what makes humanity the most destructive and creative of species.

The civilized man is a larger mind but a more imperfect nature than the savage.