Kate Christensen 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?

Through trial-and-error and observable outcomes, our ancestors narrowed the field of edible mushroom candidates to just a few with remarkable, health-supporting properties.

As humans become civilized, the survival rate of the lazy, botched and dim-witted grow in inverse proportion to the productive segment since nature can no longer remove them from the species.

I am afforded a bit of easy wonderment in relative comfort as to how humans have lasted so long. Climate- and geography-wise, the planet seems to have little use for us.

Back in humanity's hunter-gatherer days, you only ate meat if you'd recently made a kill, which required a huge amount of effort, and was therefore relatively rare. There's a reason humans only have one set of incisors to rip our meat apart: we're not supposed to eat the stuff at every meal.

Life is an error-making and an error-correctin g process, and nature in marking man's papers will grade him for wisdom as measured both by survival and by the quality of life of those who survive.

I've written a number of books that have to do with the evolution of humans, human intelligence, human emotions.

One can say with reasonable confidence that the likelihood of something analogous to a human evolving is really pretty high.

I think almost everything about humans and human civilization is explained better by evolution than anything else.

Fear, love, and hunger were the agents that developed the wits of the lower animals, as they were, of course, the prime factors in developing the intelligence of man.

What people don't realize is the human body and the brain are so well designed to do - by millions of years of evolution - what we do.

We believe that civilization has been created under the pressure of the exigencies of life at the cost of satisfaction of the instincts.

I am sure I was an evolutionist in the abstract, or by the quality and complexion of my mind, before I read Darwin, but to become an evolutionist in the concrete, and accept the doctrine of the animal origin of man, has not for me been an easy matter.

There is indeed the possibility that the evolutionary process has, in gray antiquity, bred into us an excess of aggression.

Humans are just a very, very small part of the panoply of life, and it is arguable that in a certain sense, humans have emancipated themselves from Darwinian selection.

I think the default position of humans is to be terrible, and we have to train it out of our children. That's just part of survival, right? Predator animals don't survive by being nice; humans are basically predator animals.

If Darwin's theories are true, then we have within us the physical memory of when we were fish or apes.

Our bodies and minds evolved and were adapted for hundreds of thousands of years for tasks like climbing a tree and picking apples, or hunting rabbits, or looking for mushrooms in the forest. They were not adapted to the very gruelling work that is involved in field work - ploughing, harvesting, bringing water, digging weeds - things like that.

The point of human evolution is adapting to circumstance. Not letting go of the old, but adapting it, is necessary.

We've almost been wiped out as a species many times, going back millions of years, and we've survived by reinventing ourselves and enlarging our circles of awareness, inventing new technologies and social structures.

If a group of humans began to run regularly, perhaps allowing them to hunt or scavenge more effectively, anatomical changes would follow, especially among the still-developing youngsters.

I do like going out and finding free food. I've done it since I was a child. Fishing prawns and shrimps from the sea is wonderful, as is picking blackberries, sloes and mushrooms. Having a guide while out looking for mushrooms is really important, though, as picking the wrong type can be quite dangerous.

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.

Just as your own existence is unlikely and far from inevitable, the evolution of modern humans as a species depended on a whole string of chance events - some happening in the environments our ancestors inhabited, and some inside their own bodies, including random mutations in their DNA.

In one of my latest conversations with Darwin he expressed himself very gloomily on the future of humanity, on the ground that in our modern civilization natural selection had no play, and the fittest did not survive. Those who succeed in the race for wealth are by no means the best or the most intelligent, and it is notorious that our population is more largely renewed in each generation from the lower than from the middle and upper classes.