It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one.
In the long history of humankind, those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.
No bodily thing was born for us to use. Nature had no such aim, but what was born creates the use.
Every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a pre-existing closely allied species.
It suddenly flashed upon me that this self-acting process would necessarily improve the race, because in every generation the inferior would inevitably be killed off and the superior would remain.
The evolution of the brain not only overshot the needs of prehistoric man, it is the only example of evolution providing a species with an organ which it does not know how to use.
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
We are survival machines — robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.
We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators.
The hunger of the gene — to replicate, to survive, to propagate — is the most ancient hunger in the history of life.
