13 quotes
The rapid accumulation of change is not always progress, and forward motion is not always an advance.
The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (1994)
All times seem special to those who live in them.
The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (1994)
Whether or not we choose to watch, evolution is shaping us all.
The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (1994)
Why are there so many kinds of animals? Adaptive radiations like Darwin’s finches are the essence of the answer.
The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (1994)
We are doing what the dinosaurs did before us, only faster. We bring strangers together to make strange bedfellows, and we remake the beds they lie in, all at once.
The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (1994)
The pamphlet teaches the skills that skills that Benzer’s former labmates would now need to learn, including propaganda, “that branch of lying which consists in very nearly deceiving your friends without quite deceiving your enemies.”
Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior (1999)
One test of a true clock is its ability to keep time through a wide range of temperatures. A clock that speeds up in hot weather and slows down in cold weather is not a clock, although it may make a good thermometer.
Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior (1999)
Evolution discloses a meaning in death, although the meaning is like some of the berries that Darwin tasted in the Galapagos, “acid & Austere.” There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. Even Drought bears fruit. Even death is a seed.
The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (1994)
All three spoke in the kind of down-home, common-as-flies style that is the lingua franca of great scientists, conveying a contempt for pretension, a contempt for cant, a delight in common sense, combined with uncommon curiosity about what is really there.
Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior (1999)
What we don’t understand on either front is that the more pressure we put on our pests, the more we cause them to evolve around the pressure. The pressure is evolutionary pressure; what we fail to understand is evolution itself.
The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (1994)
Geneticists will tell you that. Evolution is always happening. What they mean is that the genes of this generation are not precisely what they were the preceding generation. Nor will they be precisely the same in the next. And evolution is that change.
The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (1994)
Taken together, these new studies suggest that Darwin did not know the strength of his own theory. He vastly underestimated the power of natural selection. Its action is neither rare nor slow. It leads to evolution daily and hourly, all around us, and we can watch.
The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (1994)
“Molecular biology has no history for the young scientist,” one of the old guard declared not long ago.
Sydney Brenner qualified that: “I hold the somewhat weaker view that history does exist for the young, but is divided into two epochs: the past two years, and everything that went before.”
Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior (1999)