I’m working in this very complex set of issues having to do with who we are as a species and how much we can do to the Earth before it starts to buckle under. My work can easily read as an indictment, but I don’t see it as that simple a problem.
It is a pleasant thing to reflect upon, and furnishes a complete answer to those who contend for the gradual degeneration of the human species, that every baby born into the world is a finer one than the last.
Is the destiny of the human species to sit back and play with our mouse and computer and imagine, fantasize?
Generally speaking, rural drivers are a much better behaved species than city drivers. I’m not sure whether they’re intrinsically this way, or there are just fewer opportunities for them to do behave badly. You can’t go around running red lights if there aren’t any red lights to run.
As long as I can remember, I’ve always had pets. Something about the connection you share with this entirely different species just blows my mind.
But the truth is that Homo sapiens is a sensual species. I think all species are, to one degree or another.
The quality of our reading is not only an index of the quality of our thought; it is our best-known route to developing whole new pathways in the cerebral evolution of our species.
Americans should be ashamed of how aflutter they get about Downton Abbey – it’s unpatriotic. I seem to remember we fought a revolution so as not to put up with this nonsense, where notions of station are so unforgiving that upper and lower echelons are practically different species.
There are eight or nine leading varieties of rice grown in Japan, all of which, except an upland species, require mud, water, and much puddling and nasty work. Rice is the staple food and the wealth of Japan. Its revenues were estimated in rice. Rice is grown almost wherever irrigation is possible.
The damage that climate change is causing and that will get worse if we fail to act goes beyond the hundreds of thousands of lives, homes and businesses lost, ecosystems destroyed, species driven to extinction, infrastructure smashed and people inconvenienced.
‘Man is an endangered species,’ announces one of the titles at the beginning of the sci-fi lump ‘Battlefield Earth.’ And after about 20 minutes of this amateurish picture, extinction doesn’t seem like such a bad idea.
Humans are distinguished from other species by a massive brain that enables us to imagine a future and influence it by what we do in the present. By using experience, knowledge and insight, our ancestors recognized they could anticipate dangers and opportunities and take steps to exploit advantages and avoid hazards.
I’m hoping to make a new thing for the world that remains in the mind like a new species of living thing.
Planting native species in our gardens and communities is increasingly important, because indigenous insects, birds and wildlife rely on them. Over thousands, and sometimes millions, of years they have co-evolved to live in local climate and soil conditions.
If we confound and break up the proposed unfolding the world impresses upon us, we can give ourselves the space to consider what we want to be as a species.
The mode of consciousness of nonhuman species is quite different from human consciousness.
Al Gore is not just whistling in the wind. Global warming is for real. Every scientist knows that now, and we are on our way to the destruction of every species on earth, if we don’t pay attention and reverse our course.
The coniferous forests of the Yosemite Park, and of the Sierra in general, surpass all others of their kind in America, or indeed the world, not only in the size and beauty of the trees, but in the number of species assembled together, and the grandeur of the mountains they are growing on.
I was taught over and over again that the accumulation of random mutations led to evolutionary change – led to new species. I believed it until I looked for evidence.
There’s always the danger when you have influenzas that infect chickens, that when you have the close quarters of chickens spreading from one to another and occasionally a human coming into close contact, that there will be the jumping of species from a chicken to a human. This is not something new.
With our evolved busy hands and our evolved busy brains, in an extraordinarily short period of time we’ve managed to alter the earth with such geologic-forcing effects that we ourselves are forces of nature. Climate change, ocean acidification, the sixth mass extinction of species.
As work in neurosciences indicates, the acquisition of literacy necessitated a new circuit in our species’ brain more than 6,000 years ago. That circuit evolved from a very simple mechanism for decoding basic information, like the number of goats in one’s herd, to the present, highly elaborated reading brain.
There is no scientific reason to think that we, even with space travel, are going to survive as a species for ever, certainly not by biting off the hand that feeds us, which is exactly what we are doing.
Evolution doesn’t care whether you believe in it or not, no more than gravity does. I want to rekindle excitement over what we’ve achieved as a species with the space program. We can’t afford to regress back to the days of superstition.
We are a naturally hierarchical species.
What we are doing to the future of our children, and the other species on the planet, is a clear moral issue.
When, as an undergraduate, I began experiments on these slime molds in 1940, only one other person, Kenneth Raper, was working on them at that time. In fact, he discovered the model species Dictyostelium discoideum, which is the species used in the majority of the experimental work today.
Where do we say that a cell became a blade of grass, which became a starfish, which became a cat, which became a donkey, which became a human being? There’s a real lack of evidence from change from actual species to a different type of species.
We need to emphasize the more positive aspects of our species.
Men and women belong to different species and communications between them is still in its infancy.
All species capable of grasping this fact manage better in the struggle for existence than those which rely upon their own strength alone: the wolf, which hunts in a pack, has a greater chance of survival than the lion, which hunts alone.
What prevails in every corner of this globalized world is the real struggle of our species for its own survival.
We’re being challenged to do something so profound, it’s unprecedented in the history of our species, and there couldn’t be more at stake. It’s not even our species at stake; it’s the whole dream of life on earth that’s taken 4.5 billion years to realize – all this beautiful pastoral life on earth.
If we continue to address the issue of the environment where we live as though we’re the only species that lives here, we’ll create a disaster for ourselves.
The way to understand how different species evolved is to think about the niches that they fill in an ecosystem – basically, how they make a living.
The reproduction of mankind is a great marvel and mystery. Had God consulted me in the matter, I should have advised him to continue the generation of the species by fashioning them out of clay.
As Darwin himself was at pains to point out, natural selection is all about differential survival within species, not between them.
Perceptual reality is different for different species. In certain species it is a mode of observation, so what we call scientific fact is actually not ultimate truth, it is perceptual experience, and it’s a mode of observation.
Noise does not disturb me, as I think that it gives a quaint atmosphere to a picture that fully matches my vision of nature and the wild species I like to photograph.
There is only one valid species of voyage, which is walk towards the men.
So I think as a biologist I would like us to focus on this planet and finding solutions to sustaining humanity, to improving people’s lives globally, but doing our absolute utmost to preserve as much biodiversity as we can, knowing that we have already been responsible for the loss of thousands of species.
Dogs who live in each other’s company are calm and pragmatic, never showing the desperate need to make known their needs and feelings or to communicate their observations, as some hysterical dogs who know only the company of our species are likely to do.
The ability to write and read books is one of the things that transformed us as a species.
‘Humankind’ is an attempt to think the human species without Nature and without humanity.
Racism really, really makes me mad. I can see identical traits in people from other sides of the world and I can’t believe some people would treat other human beings like they weren’t even the same species.
The question of one versus two species of African elephants isn’t about settling an arcane DNA argument; it’s about life or death for these majestic, extraordinary creatures.
It has adopted the geometry most advantageous to the species or, in other words, the most convenient.
If we could figure out ways for kids to exit college without having the burden of debt, what we have really figured out is how to create a more fertile breeding ground for people who can think innovatively and progress us as a species.
