We have a love affair with the idea of the ‘natural,’ even though we, as a species, are about as unnatural as you can imagine.
Models are people. A lot of people like to make us some species that are not human; we are normal people.
We’re confronted with great darkness as a species right now as spiritual creatures on this planet. I don’t think it’s hopeless, and I don’t want ‘You’ve Never Seen Everything’ to make people feel hopeless. But I think we’ve got to call a spade a spade.
I believe the world is increasingly in danger of becoming split into groups which cannot communicate with each other, which no longer think of each other as members of the same species.
People are still very uncomfortable with the idea that humans are not specially created species. I believe we are a fantastic species. But we are not created specially. That’s very hard for people to accept in their day-to-day routine.
Hundreds of species are facing extinction due to human impacts on the environment.
It seems obvious that if a species has the brainpower for speech, along with the sort of appendages that can manipulate a pair of pliers, it will eventually blunder into science, technology, and radio.
In human history, we are going from knowledge to omniscience, from potence to omnipotence, from ethics and religion to righteousness. So, in my view, God comes at the end of this long process. This may not happen in our lifetimes or even in the lifetime of our species.
Viruses have to live somewhere. They can only replicate in living creatures. So, when the Ebola virus disappears between outbreaks, it has to be living in some reservoir host, presumably some species of animal.
Thousands of years ago, humans domesticated every possible large wild mammal species fulfilling all those criteria and worth domesticating, with the result that there have been no valuable additions of domestic animals in recent times, despite the efforts of modern science.
The government should promote community nurseries of mangrove species and other appropriate tree species chosen under the coastal bio-shield and agro-forestry programmes.
The adaptive markets hypothesis says that all economic institutions, like our own species, develop and change over time, depending on the population of investors that are engaged with them.
We’re the only species that can look into the future and know that we’re going to die one day, and it causes all sorts of cognitive stress on your system.
It is the great sadness of our species that we have not found a way to eliminate the conflict and to eliminate violence as a device to resolve our conflicts throughout the entire history of the human race.
This unusual and highly successful species spends a great deal of time examining his higher motives and an equal amount of time ignoring his fundamental ones.
I’m not to be confused with Natasha Henstridge in ‘Species,’ where I just emerge out of the weird alien womb looking amazing. I really rely heavily on my black outfits and my gold chains to give me sort of a thing.
Nothing has prepared sharks, squid, krill and other sea creatures for industrial-scale extraction that destroys entire ecosystems while targeting a few species.
The real threat to whales is whaling, which has endangered many whale species.
It’s very limiting to us as a species, the concept of better-than/less-than. It just seems to be at its end. I’m like, this all fades to black, and it’s gone. It’s dust. Choose carefully what you obsess about.
Civilisation is partly about restraining the male of the species from engaging in the violence of the hunter-gatherer period. But it doesn’t take an awful lot to unleash it.
If current technological processes continue without change, the environment will change, and we, the human species, will either have to mutate or even die, to disappear, as many species have disappeared.
Agriculture changes the landscape more than anything else we do. It alters the composition of species. We don’t realize it when we sit down to eat, but that is our most profound engagement with the rest of nature.
Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.
The passenger pigeon, the golden toad, the Caspian tiger: they are all gone, and other species hang by a thread. Our actions are not merely driving other species to extinction: we threaten our own survival, too, by destabilising ecosystems and destroying biodiversity.
As humans, we’re such a discontented species. We’re always trying to further ourselves, and you get all the way to the moon, and then it’s just discontent. You want to go to Mars.
U2 is an original species… there are colours and feelings and emotional terrain that we occupy that is ours and ours alone.
A small species of pinus was much prized, and, when dwarfed in the manner of the Chinese, fetched a very high price; it is generally grafted on a variety of the stone pine.
Each simian had a much different body suit, so besides trying to define class across species, there was a definite attempt to dress each group in different styles.
As a social primate species, we modulate our morals with signals from family, friends and social groups with whom we identify because in our evolutionary past, those attributes helped individuals to survive and reproduce.
The urgency to mate persists in all people as in all other mammals because of the evolutionary drive to continue the species, the inborn imperative for genes to reproduce and hormonal differences that evolved over millions of years.
Animal rights can be as extreme as not riding a horse, or not wearing leather, not having a pet at all. Animal welfare advocates are preventing the suffering of animals. And then there’s conservation and species conservation and what conservation biologists do.
We observe closely related species in sympatry and infer how they evolved from a common ancestor.
The egg of every species of animal or plant carries a definite number of bodies called chromosomes. The sperm carries the same number. Consequently, when the sperm unites with the egg, the fertilized egg will contain the double number of chromosomes.
Hope is itself a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness, which this world affords.
Until men learn to celebrate and operate on the feminine aspect of themselves and stop the oppression of women, children, the environment, other species, we don’t have a world to live in. It’s not a world that anyone chooses to live in.
Education is among the most important problems we face because it’s the ultimate ‘gateway’ problem. That is, it drives virtually every global problem that we face as a species. But there’s a flip-side: if we can fix education, then we’ll dramatically improve the other problems, too.
Eat a wide variety of species.
Happiness is just another of the tricks that our genetic system plays on us to carry out its only role, which is the survival of the species.
And History will smile to think that this is the species for which Socrates and Jesus Christ died.
The world has not yet reached the point which, in my view, is an essential condition for the survival of our human species: access by all the peoples to the material resources of this planet.
The question that will decide our destiny is not whether we shall expand into space. It is: shall we be one species or a million? A million species will not exhaust the ecological niches that are awaiting the arrival of intelligence.
We have to learn to become a new kind of entity on this world that has the maturity and the awareness to handle being a global species with the power to change our planet and use that power in a way that is conducive to the kind of global society we want to have.
The varying modes of flight exhibited by our diurnal birds of prey have always been to me a subject of great interest, especially as by means of them I have found myself enabled to distinguish one species from another, to the farthest extent of my power of vision.
Human beings are the only species that deliberately deprive themselves of sleep for no apparent gain. Many people walk through their lives in an underslept state, not realizing it.
To survive as a species on this planet, we’re going to have to see ourselves as Earthlings.
The one process now going on that will take millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats. This is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us.
The fewer species there are and the fewer species we know about, the fewer questions we even know to ask.
I remember my first lecture on my first day in evolutionary biology, how populations and species change. I sat thinking, ‘Why doesn’t everyone know this?’ I look back on it almost in horror: I came so close to not knowing how exciting our world is.
Nature is a collective idea, and, though its essence exist in each individual of the species, can never in its perfection inhabit a single object.
I don’t take myself or the species too seriously. You have to laugh at everything.
Travelling through the breeding places of our species is far from being as interesting to me as it is to inspect the breeding places of the feathery tribes of our country.
An original is a creation motivated by desire. Any reproduction of an originals motivated be necessity. It is marvelous that we are the only species that creates gratuitous forms. To create is divine, to reproduce is human.
