Some of the most wonderful aspects and consequences of evolution have been discovered only recently. This is in stark contrast to creationism, which offers a static view of the world, one that cannot be challenged or tested with reason. And because it cannot make predictions, it cannot lead to new discoveries, new medicines, or new ways to feed all of us.
This is one of the reasons I get such joy from studying evolution. This kind of science is amazing and sexy.
Every question leads to new answers, new discoveries, and new smarter questions.
One organism’s trash is another organism’s treasure, as I like to say.
Try this way of picturing a human lifespan. The National Football League’s Dallas Cowboys’ stadium holds 105,000 people. Now, imagine that you’re watching life go by down on the field, and every day you watch that life go by from a different seat. You don’t even get a third of the way around. Before you’ve settled into a third of the seats, you’d be dead. And, that’s if you had a good run, eighty-two-plus years. Yikes!
Altruism is not a moral or religious ideal, no matter what some people might tell you, it is an essential biological part of who or what we are as a species.
Any differences we traditionally associate with race are a produce of our need for vitamin D and our relationship to the Sun.
Science is the way in which we know nature and our place within it.
Humans Control the Earth; Nerds Should Guide the Humans.
This is a book about everything. It is about everything I know and about everything I think you should know, too.
Scientifically speaking, there is tribalism and group bias, but there cannot be any such thing as racism. We are all one.
No other organism on Earth does that. Yes, yes, I understand that dolphins are very smart, but I don’t think they build libraries or even contemplate such a project.
Skin color is basically a measure of the local ultraviolet levels, and it is controlled by relatively minor adaptive changes in the genome.
We are killing off species at the rate of about one per day. It is estimated that humans are driving species to extinction at least a thousand times faster than the otherwise natural rate.
I myself have had long discussions with my dog friends, and by that I mean my friends who are dogs.
More than five hundred people have flown in space and twelve people have walked on the moon, but only three humans in history have been to the bottom of the ocean.
If you’re a creationist reading this, and you want to remark something like, “Well, that’s the way he did it,” I’ll tell you right back, that is just not reasonable, nor is it satisfactory. If we were playing on a team right now, I’d say, “Get your head in the game.
We are all aware that evolution happens, because we all have parents.
We all have DNA, and it’s nearly the same. In rhesus monkeys, we’re close to 93 percent the same. In mice, it’s closer to 90 percent overall.
A woman came up to Michael Faraday after he performed this demonstration and asked: “But, Mr. Faraday, of what use is it?” Faraday famously replied, “Madam, of what use is a newborn babe?