Evolutionary Change Quotes

Adapt or Die

We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.

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

Removing the faults in a stage-coach may produce a perfect stage-coach, but it is unlikely to produce the first motor car.

A revolution is not an event. It's a process. And it takes its time.

There are two options: adapt or die.

Evolution is a process of constant branching and expansion.

When you look at Earth from that one picture, the one from space, it's really a rather attractive thing. I have nothing against the planet per se. I root for the big comet or asteroid as a way of cleansing the planet. The comet or asteroid 65 million years ago is probably what gave us our opening to replace the reptiles. The greatest entertainment I have in my life is chronicling internally, not necessarily for the public, the slow dissolution of order.

We are the product of 4.5 billion years of fortuitous, slow biological evolution. There is no reason to think that the evolutionary process has stopped. Man is a transitional animal. He is not the climax of creation.

We will not find the inner strength to evolve to a higher level if we do not inwardly develop this profound feeling that there is something higher than ourselves.

Make incremental progress, change comes not by the yard, but by the inch.

Animals can adapt to problems and make inventions, but often no faster than natural selection can do its work - the world acts as its own simulator in the case of natural selection.

Gradualism in theory is perpetuity in practice.

Growth becomes less important than stability; we have to give people changes slowly.

I'm kind of conservative. I like to build on what I've done in the past and try something new.

Only by a process of peaceful evolution can China accomplish its own goals of being a free, prosperous, and strong country.

Evolution - evolutionary change - does not happen quickly.

Los Angeles is the evolutionary edge.

Where do we say that a cell became a blade of grass, which became a starfish, which became a cat, which became a donkey, which became a human being? There's a real lack of evidence from change from actual species to a different type of species.

New gene pools are generated in every generation, and evolution takes place because the successful individuals produced by these gene pools give rise to the next generation.

Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also and keep pace with the times

Given the fact of evolution, one would expect the fossils to document a gradual steady change from ancestral forms to the descendants. But this is not what the paleontologist finds. Instead, he or she finds gaps in just about every phyletic series.

The human digestive and visual systems did clearly evolve over a very long period.

Man is a transitional animal. He is not the climax of creation

We want traditional change—not transformational change.