#natural

Natural selection involves no plan, no goal, and no direction — just genes increasing and decreasing in frequency depending on whether individuals with those genes have, relative to other individuals, greater or lesser reproductive success. ↗

— Randolph M. Nesse

#natural-selection #nature

The blue sky, the brown soil beneath, the grass, the trees, the animals, the wind, and rain, and stars are never strange to me; for I am in and of and am one with them; and my flesh and the soil are one, and the heat in my blood and in the sunshine are one, and the winds and the tempests and my passions are one. I feel the 'strangeness' only with regard to my fellow men, especially in towns, where they exist in conditions unnatural to me, but congenial to them.... In such moments we sometimes feel a kinship with, and are strangely drawn to, the dead, who were not as these; the long, long dead, the men who knew not life in towns, and felt no strangeness in sun and wind and rain. ↗

— William Henry Hudson

#nature #men

In Tulsa, a girl would no sooner have run around with unstraightened hair than she would have run around naked. It would have been worse than running around naked, letting everyone see your naps (40). ↗

— Martha Southgate

#midwest #natural-hair #self-esteem #white-supremacy #nature

I don't differentiate much, except in degree, between people who believe in religion from those who believe in astrology, magic or the supernatural. ↗

— Andy Rooney

#astrology #atheism #belief #beliefs #magic

I am, indeed, an absolute materialist so far as actual belief goes; with not a shred of credence in any form of supernaturalism—religion, spiritualism, transcendentalism, metempsychosis, or immortality. ↗

— H.P. Lovecraft

#immortality #materialism #naturalism #religion #supernatural

For, from the time that the Bishop of Rome had gotten to be acknowledged for bishop universal, by pretence of succession to St. Peter, their whole hierarchy, or kingdom of darkness, may be compared not unfitly to the kingdom of fairies; that is, to the old wives' fables in England concerning ghosts and spirits, and the feats they play in the night. And if a man consider the original of this great ecclesiastical dominion, he will easily perceive that the papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof: for so did the papacy start up on a sudden out of the ruins of that heathen power. ↗

— Thomas Hobbes

#belief #catholic-church #fairies #heathen #materialism

When men are easy in their circumstances, they are naturally enemies to innovations. ↗

— Joseph Addison

#easy #innovations #men #naturally #their

I don't really have an issue with showing certain parts of my body. I'd rather not, but it's not a big deal. Growing up in Sweden, it's natural over there. ↗

— Malin Akerman

#big deal #body #certain #deal #growing

Suspicion is not less an enemy to virtue than to happiness; he that is already corrupt is naturally suspicious, and he that becomes suspicious will quickly be corrupt. ↗

— Joseph Addison

#becomes #corrupt #enemy #happiness #less

A more effective international disease surveillance system is essential for global security both against a bioterrorist attack or a naturally occurring disease. ↗

— Daniel Akaka

#attack #both #disease #effective #essential