Terry Pratchett Quotes

A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known.

With each new day in Africa, a gazelle wakes up knowing he must outrun the fastest lion or perish. At the same time, a lion stirs and stretches, knowing he must outrun the fastest gazelle or starve. It's no different for the human race. Whether you consider yourself a gazelle or a lion, you have to run faster than others to survive.

Evolution doesn't just look for things that are fun; if it did, we'd know how to fly.

In the survival of favoured individuals and races, during the constantly-recurring struggle for existence, we see a powerful and ever-acting form of selection.

The law of evolution is that the strongest survives.

Evolution is not finished; reason is not the last word nor the reasoning animal the supreme figure of Nature. As man emerged out of the animal, so out of man the superman emerges.

A grain in the balance will determine which individual shall live and which shall die - which variety or species shall increase in number, and which shall decrease, or finally become extinct.

I'm here as a product of process of evolution, which doesn't make very many exceptions. And which rates life relatively cheaply.

Natural selection certainly operates. It explains how bacteria will gain antibiotic resistance; it will explain how insects get insecticide resistance, but it doesn't explain how you get bacteria or insects in the first place.

As human beings, we are the genetic elite, the sentient, contemplating and innovating sum of countless genetic accidents and transcription errors.

In the game of life, less diversity means fewer options for change. Wild or domesticated, panda or pea, adaptation is the requirement for survival.

When I see how fast technology is advancing, my mind thinks of evolution and how organisms also have to evolve or adapt in order to, in their case, survive.

Whatever the life form, evolution selects for economy of resources.

Nature favors those organisms which leave the environment in better shape for their progeny to survive.

We know from biology that new forms of organisms simulate their primitive form as closely as possible at first, even though obliged to exist under changed internal and external conditions.

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.

If you really want to study evolution, you've got go outside sometime, because you'll see symbiosis everywhere!

It has become evident that the primary lesson of the study of evolution is that all evolution is coevolution: every organism is evolving in tandem with the organisms around it.

If evolution is outlawed, only outlaws will evolve.

Evolution is an indispensable component of any satisfying explanation of our psychology.

As Darwin himself was at pains to point out, natural selection is all about differential survival within species, not between them.

The way to understand how different species evolved is to think about the niches that they fill in an ecosystem - basically, how they make a living.

Biologically the species is the accumulation of the experiments of all its successful individuals since the beginning.

The greater part of the members of animals were generated by chance... What, then, hinders but that the parts in Nature may also thus arise from necessity? For instance, that the teeth should arise from necessity, the front teeth sharp and adapted to divide the food, the molars broad and adapted to breaking the food into pieces. It may be said that they were not made for this purpose, but that this purposive arrangement came about by chance; and the same reasoning is applied to other parts of the body in which subsistence for some purpose is apparent. And it is argued that where all things happened as if they were made for some purpose, being aptly united by chance, these were preserved, but such as were not aptly made, these were lost and still perish.