Roger Tory Peterson Quotes

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.'

Very few species have survived unchanged. There's one called lingula, which is a little shellfish, a little brachiopod about the size of my fingernail, that has survived for 500 million years, but it's survived by being unobtrusive and doing nothing, and you can't accuse human beings of that.

Mr. Darwin refers to the multitude of the individual of every species, which, from one cause or another, perish either before, or soon after attaining maturity.

For much of history it was possible to believe that the great diversity of life on Earth was a fixed creation, that the living world had never changed. But when the first stirrings of industry demanded that fuel be dug from the earth and hillsides be leveled for roads and railways, the Earth's true past was dug up in abundance.

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

The biological world always seems poised to innovate.

The history of life is a tale of decimation and later stabilization of few surviving anatomies, not a story of steady expansion and progress.

If you do not change, you can become extinct !

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

IF you don't change, you can become extinct!

Speed is what distinguishes intelligence. No bird discovers how to fly: evolution used a trillion bird-years to 'discover' that – where merely hundreds of person-years sufficed.

When we’ve ceased hearing or changing, we need a new environment.

I think the way the world has evolved, it's maybe caught up to me. It makes more sense and it makes it click on a larger scale.

It's like the animal kingdom. Adapt or go extinct.

Since the world has changed so much, the same values don't lead to the same choices anymore.

Everything has to evolve or else it perishes.

In the history of the world the prize has not gone to those species which specialized in methods of violence, or even in defensive armor. In fact, nature began with producing animals encased in hard shells for defense against the ill of life. But smaller animals, without external armor, warm-blooded, sensitive, alert, have cleared those monsters off the face of the earth.

Evolution normally does not come to a halt, but constantly 'tracks' the changing environment.

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

The biggest bursts of speciation that we know about in the history of the earth are soon after great cataclysms, like the extinction of the dinosaurs, which create new opportunities, and all sorts of new forms spring up... So, quite often, the reasons for creativity depend on accidents or disasters that prevent the normal habits being carried out.

Most species do their own evolving, making it up as they go along, which is the way Nature intended. And this is all very natural and organic and in tune with mysterious cycles of the cosmos, which believes that there's nothing like millions of years of really frustrating trial and error to give a species moral fiber and, in some cases, backbone.

The fish that first ventured ashore had considerable practical problems.

The great mystery of adaptation is that true fidelity can only be achieved through lavish promiscuity.

A cockroach can’t defeat a dinosaur. But the cockroach is better at one thing, and it has ensured its survival through the ages: Adaptation. One could adapt to the environment and the other one couldn’t.