Mark Kurlansky Quotes

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

Every species becomes extinct; at some point, we will go extinct. The question is, as Homo sapiens, are we going to be able to adapt to the change that we're actually part of? We're causing such dramatic changes to the planet, so yes, you do stop and think, 'I wonder where we're headed.'

The truth is, everything is eating and being eaten.

Fishes live in the sea, as men do on land: the great ones eat up the little ones.

Biodiversity starts in the distant past and it points toward the future.

Nature is an incredible cooperative. When things operate outside of that cooperative, they die off. It's a very simple rule that nature operates under.

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

We have enforced a Darwinian process on wolves, turning them into the shy and elusive animals they've become. They didn't have that fear of us 30,000 years ago. We didn't have gunpowder; we had rocks. Wolves would have seen us as lunch, and we were weak and slow and tasty.

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.

Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature's inexorable imperative.

I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term Natural Selection.

In October, 1838, … I happened to read for amusement Malthus on population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long continuous observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favorable variations would tend to be preserved and unfavorable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work

Nature has no reverence towards life. Nature treats life as though it were the most valueless thing in the world....

If the age of the Earth were a calendar year and today were a breath before midnight on New Year's Eve, we showed up a scant fifteen minutes ago, and all of recorded history has blinked by in the last sixty seconds. Luckily for us, our planet-mates--the fantastic meshwork of plants, animals, and microbes--have been patiently perfecting their wares since March, an incredible 3.8 billion years since the first bacteria. ...After 3.8 billion years of research and development, failures are fossils, and what surrounds us is the secret to survival.

Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress.

As some species die out, forms better adapted to utilize the obstacles against which they struggled in vain come into being.

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.

Buzzards got to eat, same as the worms.

It was the bumble bee and the butterfly who survived, not the dinosaur.

To many people, 'biodiversity' is almost synonymous with the word 'nature,' and 'nature' brings to mind steamy forests and the big creatures that dwell there. Fair enough. But biodiversity is much more than that, for it encompasses not only the diversity of species, but also the diversity within species.

Take, for example, the African jungle, the home of the cheetah. On whom does the cheetah prey? The old, the sick, the wounded, the weak, the very young, but never the strong. Lesson: If you would not be prey, you had better be strong.

Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment.

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

Nature never makes any blunders, when she makes a fool she means it.

Fishes live in the sea, as men do a-land; the great ones eat up the little ones.