#evolution

And Robespierre, the Incorruptible, who loved us so much he cut off our heads so we would not be troubled by too many thoughts ↗

— Jennifer Donnelly

#robespierre #love

I threw a lit match into a puddle of slime and shouted, "It's alive!" Evolution is my greatest creation. ↗

— Bauvard

#evolution #funny #humor #funny

The riot had taken on a beauty of its own now. Arcs of gasoline fire under the crescent moon. Crimson tracer in mystical parabolas. Phosphorescence from the barrels of plastic bullet guns. A distant yelling like that of men below decks in a torpedoed prison ship. The scarlet whoosh of Molotovs intersecting with exacting surfaces. Helicopters everywhere: their spotlights finding one another like lovers in the Afterlife. And all this through a lens of oleaginous Belfast rain. ↗

— Adrian McKinty

#bombs #helicopters #revolution #riot #beauty

Regular crises perpetuate the past by reinvigorating cycles which started long ago. In contrast, (capital-C) Crises are the past's death knell. They function like laboratories in which the future is incubated. They have given us agriculture and the industrial revolution, technology and the labour contract, killer germs and antibiotics. Once they strike, the past ceases to be a reliable predictor of the future and a brave new world is born. ↗

— Yanis Varoufakis

#cycles #economics #industrial-revolution #technology #death

Genetics might be adequate for explaining microevolution, but microevolutionary changes in gene frequency were not seen as able to turn a reptile into a mammal or to convert a fish into an amphibian. Microevolution looks at adaptations that concern the survival of the fittest, not the arrival of the fittest... The origin of species — Darwin’s problem — remains unsolved. ↗

— Scott F. Gilbert

#confessions-of-the-darwinists #darwin #darwinism #darwinist-confessions #evolution

Terrorism works better as a tactic for dictatorships, or for would-be dictators, than for revolutionaries. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#revolution #revolutionary #state-terrorism #terrorism #dictatorship

Civilizations grow by agreements and accomodations and accretions, not by repudiations. The rebels and the revolutionaries are only eddies, they keep the stream from getting stagnant but they get swept down and absorbed, they're a side issue. Quiet desperation is another name for the human condition. If revolutionaries would learn that they can't remodel society by day after tomorrow -- haven't the wisdom to and shouldn't be permitted to -- I'd have more respect for them ... Civilizations grow and change and decline -- they aren't remade. ↗

— Wallace Stegner

#civilization #growth #human-condition #humanity #rebellion

But complex animals had obtained their adaptive flexibility at some cost--they had traded one dependency for another. It was no longer necessary to change their bodies to adapt, because now their adaptation was behavior, socially determined. That behavior required learning. In a sense, among higher animals adaptive fitness was no longer transmitted to the next generation by DNA at all. It was now carried by teaching. ↗

— Michael Crichton

#change

Neo-Darwinists say that new species emerge when mutations occur and modify an organism. I was taught over and over again that the accumulation of random mutations led to evolutionary change [which] led to new species. I believed it until I looked for evidence. ↗

— Lynn Margulis

#evolution #macro-evolution #macroevolution #speciation #change

A conscience is easier to swallow on an empty belly, simpler to swing with a broken wrist. The people who hate money are the ones who don’t have any. The people who hate power are the ones who are powerless ↗

— Jay Kristoff

#power #revolution #inspirational