If epic poetry is a definite species, the sagas do not fall within it.
As species are exterminated by shifting climate zones, ecosystems can collapse, destroying more species.
As a species, I think if we could be half as good as dogs, I think the world would be a much better place.
Beetles and butterflies are sometimes restricted to small areas. Each mountain in a range, and even the different zones of a mountain, may have its own peculiar species. But the house-fly seems to be everywhere. I wonder if any island in mid-ocean is flyless.
Our species likes being social.
Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species.
It gets harder and harder to make movies about human beings. These movies are like an endangered species. Everything is ‘simplify, simplify’ now. How many movies have sub-plots anymore?
‘Penny Dreadful’ is so realistic. The tonality is so earthy and so real that I actually believe it is in the realm of possibility for all these extra species to exist among us.
Eurasia ended up with the most domesticated animal species in part because it’s the world’s largest land mass and offered the most wild species to begin with.
I think that my main criticism in that book was directed at the general assumption that adaptation characterizes populations and species, rather than simply the individuals in the populations and species.
When you deal with something like compassion for physical pain, which we know is very, very old in evolution – we can find evidence for it in nonhuman species – the brain processes it at a faster speed. Compassion for mental pain took many seconds longer.
The reason we form networks is because the benefits of a connected life outweigh the costs. It’s to our advantage as individuals and a species to assemble ourselves in this fashion.
The question of energy is an important one. The big issue is how to get it, how not to destroy the environment, and how to survive as a species. It’s a big deal.
The immune system has evolved the capacity to react specifically with a very large number of foreign molecules with which it had no previous contact while avoiding reactivity for autologous molecules, naturally antigenic in other species or in other individuals of the same species.
The purpose of farming is to deprive other species of the land and sequester it for our own use. But by perfecting the art of monoculture, it has become too easy for us to exterminate everything else, leaving no wild plants, no food for insects, and a barren land for birds.
In the world of commercial speech, tobacco advertising bears the earmarks of an endangered species.
I have heard endlessly that fish are so resilient that there is no way that you could exterminate a species. We are learning otherwise.
Babies and young children are like the research and development division of the human species, and we grown-ups are production and marketing.
Science is one of a handful of things that defines us as a very special species. It is amazing how far we have been able to get and how accurate our predictions are. I think understanding how the universe was born is very important. It really gives us a perspective on many things.
Your soul is a dark forest. But the trees are of a particular species, they are genealogical trees.
In science, we take large numbers of disparate facts and reduce them to see patterns. We use the patterns to reduce the amount of information. It’s the reason we name species and genera and families in biology. It’s also the reason we have names for certain types of geological features and so on in other fields.
We see that pedantry has never been held in such esteem for the government of the world as in our times, and it offers as many paths of the true intelligible species and objects of infallible and sole truth as there are individual pedants.
As a species, we’ve always been interested in what happens when we’re no longer around, all the way back to ‘Revelations’ in ‘The New Testament.’
The vast majority of terrestrial species are in fact microbes, and scientists have only begun scratching the surface of the microbial realm. It is entirely possible that examples of life as we don’t know it have so far been overlooked.
Karan Thapar is an endangered species. They don’t make them like him anymore. True, thousands have gone to the Doon Valley School after him, as indeed to Oxford and Cambridge universities. But Karan Thapar is more than the sum of his upbringing. He’s a gentleman journalist.
Safeguarding our common home is not only essential to protecting endangered species and preserving old-growth forests, it is also paramount to ending poverty, fighting injustice, and protecting the long-term survival of humankind and of our faith.
You look at the fact that for millions of years species on earth have been developing and we’ve been knocking them off at like a hundred a day.
Politicians need a better understanding of global ecology. We need to be freed from our species-specific arrogance. No evidence exists that we are ‘chosen’, the unique species for which all the others were made. Nor are we the most important one because we are so numerous, powerful and dangerous.
Going to Mars would evolve humankind into a two-planet species.
A decade down the line, I don’t want to sit back and think that I didn’t do anything to stop disasters like the extinction of certain species.
Dogs are a companion species. It’s about time – you have an animal for about 15, 16 years, a generation. That time holds so much. You might have had five or six relationships with human beings but one dog.
If we lived within our means – by being prudent – the 7 billion people in the world could have everything they needed. Global politics should be moving in that direction. But we think as people and countries, not as a species.
For a solitary animal egoism is a virtue that tends to preserve and improve the species: in any kind of community it becomes a destructive vice.
We’re the only species who follow unstable leaders. This is true – it has little to do with America – around the world, pack leaders are unstable. Animals don’t follow that.
My new house has a deck that wraps around my writing room; my writing room has many windows, and outside the windows I’ve hung bird feeders… for enticing different species. So I imagine I will be writing about that.
But I think ‘Love, Actually’ has a very realistic view of human nature in line with the latest scientific evidence. The opening scene, where Hugh Grant’s character talks about the arrivals gate at Heathrow, is about friendship and connection, it’s about who we really are as a species.
I don’t think there was a thunderclap or a divine spark that suddenly made one species smart. You can see, in our ancestors, there was a gradual expansion of the brain; there was an expansion of the complexity of tools.
There is a slight problem with being a conceptual artist these days: You won’t get paid. But this levels the field and takes the art of money out of the field of serious art. The only conceptual artists who would conceive of making money on the Internet are a lowbrow species known as hustlers.
For the first time in evolution as a species, we’re hitting an energy ceiling.
It’s my life’s aim to make people understand the job of an actor, what they go through, and why they are such a protected species. People see the glamour part of it. But there’s so much stress that often you don’t even pay attention to the luxuries.
It turns out that the God whose word will stand forever does not exist to insure our fantasies that we will not have to die as individuals or as a species. Such a God, moreover, does not invite us to presume we can comprehend God’s creation.
Each person is an idiom unto himself, an apparent violation of the syntax of the species.
I’ve had a love of animals from birth. I love getting to know other species. We should all be aware that there is not one thing we can give a wild animal in captivity that they need.
He is a state of matter, a form of life, a sort of animal, and a species of the Order Primates, akin nearly or remotely to all of life and indeed to all that is material.
The fin whale is the second largest whale species on Earth, weighing up to 80 tons.
Cincinnati has one of the most diverse animal collections in the world, with more than 500 species represented. They also have a really good insect exhibit.
The protection of biodiversity and, therefore, of endangered species is an issue to which I attach a great deal of importance.
We live in a world bathed in 5,000 times more energy than we consume as a species in the year, in the form of solar energy. It’s just not in usable form yet.
Clean air and water, a diversity of animal and plant species, soil and mineral resources, and predictable weather are annuities that will pay dividends for as long as the human race survives – and may even extend our stay on Earth.
If you look at landscape in historical terms, you realize that most of the time we have been on Earth as a species, what has fallen on our retina is landscape, not images of buildings and cars and street lights.
We are animals, born from the land with the other species. Since we’ve been living in cities, we’ve become more and more stupid, not smarter. What made us survive all these hundreds of thousands of years is our spirituality; the link to our land.
