We’ve sourced some of the most interesting and thought-provoking Species Quotes from John W. Gardner, Heather Mac Donald, Dwight Schultz, H. P. Lovecraft, James Boswell. Each of the following quotes is overflowing with creativity, and knowledge.
All laws are an attempt to domesticate the natural ferocity of the species.
There are few student species more nakedly ambitious, focused, and future-oriented than the average Harvard law student.
People will be fascinated. We will think of each other in a far more homogeneous way, because we will know that there is something that is different from us. And when we say ‘us,’ it will mean as a species.
I am not very proud of being an human being; in fact, I distinctly dislike the species in many ways. I can readily conceive of beings vastly superior in every respect.
If venereal delight and the power of propagating the species were permitted only to the virtuous, it would make the world very good.
I don’t take myself or the species too seriously. You have to laugh at everything.
Species go extinct because there are historical contraints built into a given body or a given design.
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.
Some pundits have proposed that the aliens have come here to breed with us. Apparently, too much bike riding or something similar has rendered them incapable of reproducing within their own species. But do extraterrestrial infants toddle through your neighborhood?
Wildlife crime goes well beyond just a threat to endangered species but also has impacts on our society, economy and security. It undermines efforts to uphold the rule of law, acts as an agent for corruption, creates a barrier to development and fuels global instability.
What’s happened with society is that we have created these devices, computers, which already can register and process huge amounts of information, which is a significant fraction of the amount of information that human beings themselves, as a species, can process.
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.
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.
Humans are an infant species, a mere 150,000 years old. But, armed with a massive brain, we’ve not only survived, we’ve used our wits to adapt to and flourish in habitats as varied as deserts, Arctic tundra, tropical rainforests, wetlands and high mountain ranges.
I accept extinction as best explaining disjoined species. I see that the same cause must have reduced many species of great range to small, and that it may have reduced large genera to so small, and of families.
Around the world today we’re seeing an incredible transformation, from what I would call a biocidal species, one that – whether we intentionally or unintentionally – have designed our systems to kill life, a lot of the time.
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.
In a state therefore of great equality and virtue, where pure and simple manners prevailed, the increase of the human species would evidently be much greater than any increase that has been hitherto known.
What is a fish without a river? What is a bird without a tree to nest in? What is an Endangered Species Act without any enforcement mechanism to ensure their habitat is protected? It is nothing.
We’re a miserably violent species. But there’s a complication, which is we don’t hate violence, we hate the wrong kind. And when it’s the right kind, we cheer it on, we hand out medals, we vote for, we mate with our champions of it. When it’s the right kind of violence, we love it.
Herein lies our problem. If we level that much land to grow rice and whatever, then no other animal could live there except for some insect pest species. Which is very unfortunate.
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.
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.
Think of all the different features from Asian to African to Aboriginal to Caucasian. But we are all within the same species, Homo Sapiens.
Transhumanism is the ethics and science of using things like biological and genetic engineering to transform our bodies and make us a more powerful species.
There is only one valid species of voyage, which is walk towards the men.
Original movies of any size are an endangered species.
I think that this misses out on some of the interesting narrative realities, which is that it actually doesn’t work very well, that eliminating diversity is actually a really good way to make a species and its individuals less robust.
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.
The human species was not born into a market economy. Bees won’t sell you honey if you offer them an electronic funds transfer. The human species imagined money into existence, and it exists – for us, not mice or wasps – because we go on believing in it.
‘Humanity’ is a name not merely for a species but also for a quality.
I know a lot of people fear the rougher types who might be at a state school, but surely it is better to know who they are and how to deal with them than for that kind of child to appear as a completely different species to yours.
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.
We have a lot of historical and religious baggage in our culture. It’s ancient; we are clannish as a species. We like things to fit into boxes, and it’s unfortunate because humans are unique and should be celebrated and embraced as such.
The ability to write and read books is one of the things that transformed us as a species.
We were shooting in a French island called La Reunion. One of my crew members gifted me free-diving equipment and took me to the waters on my day off. I spotted sharks and species of fish which can’t be found elsewhere. It was a very refreshing experience for me.
Endangered species are our friends.
Aquatic invasive species are destroying the environment, damaging fisheries, and costing American taxpayers billions of dollars annually.
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.
We must recognize that we’re all part of a web of life around the world. Anytime you extinguish a species, the consequences are serious.
Every time you dive, you hope you’ll see something new – some new species. Sometimes the ocean gives you a gift, sometimes it doesn’t.
I always felt that if we ever encountered an alien species, they wouldn’t look like us or even be humanoid, like ‘E.T.’
Lyrically, ‘Planets’ is the precursor to ‘Acid Rain’; it’s about a meteoric, intergalactic war that results in an apocalypse and the human species aligning together to go fight something much better than us, our individual trials and tribulations.
There exists a species of transcendental ventriloquism by means of which men can be made to believe that something said on earth comes from Heaven.
We are evolving as one species – not only as Americans, Syrians, Russians, Chinese, and jihadists. We cannot attack one without inflicting forms of violence and destruction upon ourselves. This is our new reality.
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.
When I was in the seventh grade I did a report about the environment and the loss of species. It was supposed to be only a few pages, but ended up being nearly 50.
Hope is itself a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness, which this world affords.
I certainly look at the modern guys and think they are a different species to when we played. They are fitter and their conditioning is extraordinary.
The human species really could have faced global thermonuclear war. During seventy years of Cold War we grew used to it.
Human beings are a social species. We like to hang together in groups, just like wildebeests, just like lions. Wildebeests don’t hang with lions because lions eat wildebeests. Human beings are like that. We do what that group does that we’re trying to identify with.
There’s no question to my mind that saving our civilization and many other species is more important than our ability to do ground-based astronomy for a few decades.
There is a species of person called a ‘Modern Churchman’ who draws the full salary of a beneficed clergyman and need not commit himself to any religious belief.
I often laugh and say I should go down to the Department of the Interior and register as an endangered species. I’m a gay man over 60 and I’m alive.
It’s amazing to see how if we don’t open our minds to something different, we wont evolve as a species.
A single tree in the tropical forest in the south of Mexico has more different species than some European countries.
With the exception of certain rodents, no other vertebrate except Homo sapiens habitually destroys members of his own species.
Cirque du Soleil distinguished itself by being a circus with no animals. Before then, circus was partly about showing how man can tame other species.
As a species, I think we have no choice but to try and forecast pandemics.
It’s never enjoyable watching yourself. Because you’re never as good looking as you hope you are. You’re not expecting to be Penelope Cruz… but I’m a female of the species. I have my hang-ups and all of that.
A man reserves his true and deepest love not for the species of woman in whose company he finds himself electrified and enkindled, but for that one in whose company he may feel tenderly drowsy.
The intuitive connection children feel with animals can be a tremendous source of joy. The unconditional love received from pets, and the lack of artifice in the relationship, contrast sharply with the much trickier dealings with members of their own species.
There have to be reasons that you get up in the morning and you want to live. Why do you want to live? What’s the point? What inspires you? What do you love about the future? If the future does not include being out there among the stars and being a multi-planet species, I find that incredibly depressing.
I own two species of the raptors – Falco peregrinus and Falco biarmicus.
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.
‘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.
Of all the species of literary composition, perhaps biography is the most delightful. The attention concentrated on one individual gives a unity to the materials of which it is composed, which is wanting in general history.
There is no sense in meddling with the extinction of polar bears, not when so many more pressing human problems await. Until there’s ironclad proof of how and why extinction works, and how much evil we’ve done to hasten it along, I’m going to save my emotional anguish for dying and suffering members of my own species.
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.
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.
As a species of animal that evolved to make connections and work together, it feels strange to suppress our desire for contact. People enjoy touching each other, and find joy in seeing each other in person – but now we have to keep our physical distance.
Slavery existed before the formation of this Union. It derived from the Constitution that recognition which it would not have enjoyed without the confederation. If the States had not united together, there would have been no obligation on adjoining States to regard any species of property unknown to themselves.
Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.
By preventing dangerous asteroid strikes, we can save millions of people, or even our entire species. And, as human beings, we can take responsibility for preserving this amazing evolutionary experiment of which we and all life on Earth are a part.
A creationist can embarrass an evolutionist by asking for a definition of species.
There are minds so impatient of inferiority that their gratitude is a species of revenge, and they return benefits, not because recompense is a pleasure, but because obligation is a pain.
I read five books on the Constitution. My favorite was ‘Plain, Honest Men’ by Richard Beeman. I went on a science jag in the same way. I kept getting in arguments about evolution and being bested. So I read Charles Darwin’s ‘On the Origin of the Species,’ a fantastic book that is not that difficult.
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.
I think the climate of wrestling has changed. I think the big guy, The Giant, The Big John Studd’s of the world are an endangered species because the business has become smaller.
As a species, we can at times be dimwitted and cruel. But we’re also capable of learning.
Men and women belong to different species and communications between them is still in its infancy.
I believe in reincarnation. In my last life I was a peasant. Next time around, I’d like to be an eagle. Who hasn’t dreamed they could fly? They’re a protected species, too.
‘Humankind’ is an attempt to think the human species without Nature and without humanity.
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.
We, Homo sapiens, destroyed the majority of the large mammalian species in North America and Australasia just over 10,000 years ago. We, Homo sapiens, now are destroying the other species that presently exist on this planet at a rate of about 15,000 to 20,000 per year.
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.
Once you have become permanently startled, as I am, by the realization that we are a social species, you tend to keep an eye out for the pieces of evidence that this is, by and large, good for us.
Different viral species contain nucleic acids that differ not only in length and nucleotide sequence but in many unexpected ways as well.
Is raising boys different from raising girls? Oh my goodness, yes! It’s a different species, and I love them for that.
We can do genetics. We can do experiments on fruit flies. We can do experiments on yeast. It’s not so easy to do experiments on humans. So, in fact, it helps us, to interpret our own genetic code, to have the genetic code of the other species.
Wild geese have so much less fat than their domestic brethren that, as far as the kitchen is concerned, the two birds should be considered different species altogether – so much so that they require opposite roasting methods.
Much as I wish it were not so, we do live in a dangerous world. It has, in fact, always been this way. Our earliest ancestors had to worry about predators, natural disasters, disease, and – unique among our species – attacks by other people.
Species are going extinct because of habitat loss and warming. I feel deeply responsible and think about it every day.
Our oceans are facing innumerable threats – from overfishing and pollution to ocean acidification and invasive species – yet we haven’t had a blueprint for its use and development, incredible as that seems.
Bacteria live in unbelievable mixtures of hundreds or thousands of species. Like on your teeth. There are 600 species of bacteria on your teeth every morning.
Only an intervention by women around the world, with their innate knowledge of interdependency, deep listening, empathy and self-sacrifice, could possibly alter our species’ desperate course.
When you have children, you almost feel like you’ve made your contribution to the survival of the human species. It’s your way of passing the baton.
Every species becomes extinct; at some point, we will go extinct. The question is, as Homo sapiens, are we going to be able to adapt to the change that we’re actually part of? We’re causing such dramatic changes to the planet, so yes, you do stop and think, ‘I wonder where we’re headed.’
I don’t think you can impose limits on science because the very nature of homo sapiens is that he – she – is an inquisitive species. You can’t control science. You have to control the effects of science.
Moses – the man of God – was a species of human chameleon – scholar, general, law-giver, leader, etc.
‘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.
It’s a moral question about whether we have the right to exterminate species.
To many people, ‘biodiversity’ is almost synonymous with the word ‘nature,’ and ‘nature’ brings to mind steamy forests and the big creatures that dwell there. Fair enough. But biodiversity is much more than that, for it encompasses not only the diversity of species, but also the diversity within species.
Mars would seem, to me, to be the best place to focus our collective effort as a species… I think people would like to experience something sort of hopeful in terms of where we go next… as a species.
The more you know about a species, the more you understand about how better to help protect them.
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.
What prevails in every corner of this globalized world is the real struggle of our species for its own survival.
What makes us different from other species is our capacity for compassion and empathy with the struggles of other people.
We, as Americans, at least – I mean, I love my country – but we’re so self-righteous sometimes, in terms of, like, our nationality, our country. But we’re people from somewhere else; the true ‘Americans’ are the original peoples. It’s funny, but we’re a very territorial species.
We are the species who cooks. No other species cooks. And when we learned to cook, we became truly human.
I think a few hundred years from now we’ll start having the ‘posthuman’ era of different species.
A cockroach likely has no less brainpower than a butterfly, but we’re quicker to deny it consciousness because it’s a species we dislike.
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.
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.
An asteroid can literally destroy 80 or 90 percent of the species that are alive on Earth. These are big events. I mean, this is called extinction.
Living wild species are like a library of books still unread. Our heedless destruction of them is akin to burning the library without ever having read its books.
Measles and TB evolved from diseases of our cattle, influenza from a disease of pigs, and smallpox possibly from a disease of camels. The Americas had very few native domesticated animal species from which humans could acquire such diseases.
With every inch of land on Earth now catalogued by our satellites, the stars are the next place we as a species must travel. And with a booming world population that will hit 9.1 billion in 2050, large-scale space travel may become a necessity.
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.
A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.
Most of them are doomed to rapid extinction, but a few may make evolutionary inventions, such as physiological, ecological, or behavioral innovations that give these species improved competitive potential.
I want my great-granddaughter to have a fairly good understanding of the world in which I lived for 81 years and also the world before I came into it – all the way back a hundred thousand years, to the beginning of our species.
Several times in Earth’s history, rapid global warming occurred, apparently spurred by amplifying feedbacks. In each case, more than half of plant and animal species became extinct. New species came into being over tens and hundreds of thousands of years. But these are time scales and generations that we cannot imagine.
Dogs are not ‘people’ of another species. They are another species. To train and care for them properly, to show them how to live in our complex world, requires first and foremost that we understand that.
The most powerful words in English are ‘Tell me a story,’ words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself.
Each year, I await with dread the federal government’s catalog of endangered and threatened species in the Hawaiian Islands, where I was raised and where I live.
Human beings never think for themselves; they find it too uncomfortable. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told – and become upset if they are exposed to any different view.
Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.
No species is more important than others.
My mother loved to take us on walks in the mountains or the hills and she would point out different species that she identified, both fauna and flora.
The Bahamas has mangrove nurseries, coral reefs, shallow sea grass beds, and deep oceanic trenches – all perfect ecosystems for sharks. Photographing multiple shark species in exquisite water was the assignment I had dreamed about from the start.
Is the destiny of the human species to sit back and play with our mouse and computer and imagine, fantasize?
What we should really be thinking about is what it would look like for a truly intelligent technological species to be interacting with their planet’s atmosphere.
It is certainly for the interest of the service that a cordial interchange of civilities should subsist between superior and inferior officers, and therefore, it is bad policy in superiors to behave towards their inferiors indiscriminately, as though they were of a lower species.
The student who deceives himself into thinking that he is giving his life like an ascetic in the spirit of sacrifice for art, is the victim of a deplorable species of egotism.
I write better in Cape Breton… too many people around in Ontario. Down there I meet all sorts of non-human people, but they don’t bother me, and I don’t feel I have to apologize on behalf of my species quite so often.
You have to be able to love members of your own species before you can branch out and apply that to other species.
Animals have genes for altruism, and those genes have been selected in the evolution of many creatures because of the advantage they confer for the continuing survival of the species.
I remember the day we found the gene for the inter-species signaling molecule like it was yesterday. We got the gene, and we plugged it into a database. And we immediately saw that this gene was in an amazing number of species of bacteria. It was a huge moment of realization.
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.
Other species help children develop empathy.
These mountains appear to be almost entirely composed of stratas of rock of various colours (mostly red) and are partially covered with a dwarfish growth of pine and cedar, which are the only species of timber to be seen.
Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species.
As a species, we are most animated when our days and nights on Earth are touched by the natural world. We can find immeasurable joy in the birth of a child, a great work of art, or falling in love.
Human freedom is not an illusion; it is an objective phenomenon, distinct from all other biological conditions and found in only one species – us.
For most of the history of our species we were helpless to understand how nature works. We took every storm, drought, illness and comet personally. We created myths and spirits in an attempt to explain the patterns of nature.
Nature is indifferent to the survival of the human species, including Americans.
The genus Drosophila is one of the great success stories. There’s hundreds of species within the genus. They’re on every continent except Antarctica, they’re in tropical rain forests, they’re in deserts, they’ve evolved many exotic mating behaviors, and they’re capable of incredibly long-distance flights.
Experiments with animals have long been handicapped by our anthropocentric attitude: We often test them in ways that work fine with humans but not so well with other species.
Crime is a fact of the human species, a fact of that species alone, but it is above all the secret aspect, impenetrable and hidden. Crime hides, and by far the most terrifying things are those which elude us.
We are a species that must try to impose and find systems – systems of thought, ways of organizing and categorizing reality.
I fully support the goal of species protection and conservation and believe that recovery and ultimately delisting of species should be the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s top priority under ESA.
They call soccer the beautiful game, but if I had to identify just one sport to show members of some alien species what the human race is all about, I’d nominate squash.
I live in a ‘sky island,’ a unique mountain valley environment where half the animal species of North America can be found.
We are a very, very unusual species.
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.
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.
To survive as a species on this planet, we’re going to have to see ourselves as Earthlings.
Crime takes the pulse of a culture. It tells us the truth about us as a species.
I believe we are still so innocent. The species are still so innocent that a person who is apt to be murdered believes that the murderer, just before he puts the final wrench on his throat, will have enough compassion to give him one sweet cup of water.
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.
Globalization is very destructive to our species.
He who is unconscious of the ties which connect him with every individual of his species feels no obligation to make sacrifices for their welfare or happiness.
The stakes in my books tend to be kind of ridiculously high. In ‘Kid vs. Squid,’ the question is whether or not the California coast will be subsumed by the ocean in favor of the creation of a new Atlantis. In ‘The Boy at the End of the World,’ what’s at stake is the survival of the human species.
Sight and touch, being thus increased in capacity, might belong to some species far superior to man; or rather the human species would be far different had all the senses been thus improved.
I think when you think of death as being part of the life cycle and recognize that death is an inevitability for our species because the world has to be renewed with each death, then the hope becomes when it is renewed it will be renewed by people on whom I have had some influence for good.
Why is it not just as likely that there were as many small general nearly at first as now, and as great a disproportion in the number of their species?
The human species, according to the best theory I can form of it, is composed of two distinct races, the men who borrow and the men who lend.
Greed has been with human beings forever. We have a number of things in our species that you would call ‘the dark side,’ and greed is one of them. If you don’t put certain structures in place or restrictions on those parts of our being that come from that dark place, then it gets out of control.
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.
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.
With the advent of genetic engineering the time required for the evolution of new species may literally collapse.
We find all kinds of species that have taken up a second chromosome or a third one from somewhere, adding thousands of new traits in a second to that species. So, people who think of evolution as just one gene changing at a time have missed much of biology.
The social relations which are the basis of the reproduction of the species are founded upon the continuous union of parents in marriage.
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.
In order to have a decent chance to be a communicating species, you would have to learn to think and plan and act over time scales of a century or a millennium.
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.
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.
Perhaps genes did regulate the aging process. Perhaps different organisms had different life spans because a universal regulatory ‘clock’ was set to run at different speeds in different species.
If what distinguishes us from other species is speech, then poetry, which is the supreme linguistic operation, is our anthropological – indeed, genetic – goal.
In June as many as a dozen species may burst their buds on a single day. No man can heed all of these anniversaries; no man can ignore all of them.
Our planetary system is affected by a magnitude of force as powerful as any naturally occurring global catastrophe, but one caused solely by a single species: us.
The opening of space to human development and settlement is the most important activity of the human species. From hope to health, from wonder to wealth, the environment, and the very act of living, space is the future.
That the variability of an organism to a certain extent is a constant and certain condition of life we admit, otherwise there would be no distinguishable individuals of a species.
The Botanischer Garten in Berlin has one of Europe’s finer winter trails, leading in careful order from glasshouses devoted to African-American and Australian desert species, through a fine collection of tropical plants, and on to the orchid house.
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.
Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection determined the evolution of cultures in the same manner as it did that of species.
If we just wanted positive emotions, our species would have died out a long time ago.
We are a complex species to observe.
I like reading novels because it provides insight into human behavior. I am really interested in feelings and think they are what define us as a species. When you really get it right in acting, it’s an act of empathy. You feel less distant from others, and that is really exciting.
I hope to be a source of change and inspiration to my peers, empowering them to reach out and take action that will ensure the healthy survival of all of our species and ecosystems.
Music and dance have also always been a communal activity, something that everyone participated in. The thought of a musical concert in which a class of professionals performed for a quiet audience was virtually unknown throughout our species’ history.
If you want psychic gratification, one of the greatest ways is to know that you’ve made a real contribution to saving a species from blinking out during your lifetime.
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.
Take care, be kind, be considerate of other people and other species, and be loving.
The scariest animal is without doubt human beings. We are the only species that decimates the very environment that we require to live.
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.
Forecasts have been fundamental to mankind’s journey from a small tribe on the African savannah to a species that can sling objects across the solar system with extreme precision.
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.
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.
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.
One has children in the expectation of dying before them. In fact, you want to make damn sure you die before them, just as you plant a tree or build a house knowing, hoping that it will outlive you. That’s how the human species has done as well as it has.
We’re a very imaginative species; we’re very good at creating fictions.
Listen, you know this: If there’s not a rebellious youth culture, there’s no culture at all. It’s absolutely essential. It is the future. This is what we’re supposed to do as a species, is advance ideas.
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.
We need to recover our true nature by relocating ourselves on this planet, being respectful of our environment, and living in harmony with other species – like a big family.
As a species we are always hungry for new knowledge.
All of us are linear thinkers. We evolved in a world that was local and linear. You know, back 100,000, 200,000, millions of years ago, when we were evolving as a human species, nothing changed. You know, the life of your great-grandparents, you, your kids – it was the same. And so we are local and linear thinkers.
The real threat to whales is whaling, which has endangered many whale species.
My childhood dreams were focused on being part of the effort to make humanity a multiplanetary species.
There is a severe horse overpopulation crisis caused by overbreeding in the racing industry. It’s time for that industry to accept responsibility for its castoffs and take dramatic action to protect a species that has so loyally served humankind.
I think good things are happening to me and will continue. I am not optimistic about the rest of the species, but I’m so blessed, it’s almost scary. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I have a wildly sunny disposition. I love to laugh.
As a young boy, I was obsessed with endangered species and the extinct species that men killed off. Biology was the subject in school that I was incredibly passionate about.
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.
My dad is an entomologist and research chemist. That’s why he was in Fiji, studying the rhinoceros beetle invasive species.
I don’t get on with novelists, don’t enjoy their company. Once you’ve worked for a publisher, you understand the species, see them in their natural habitat, and it’s not always pretty.
When I think about life on Earth, there should not be a species like us. And if there was, we should be out in the jungle killing each other in small groups. That’s what you should expect.
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.
Well, I think breathing life into the Endangered Species Act, taking those wolves back into Yellowstone, restoring the salmon in the rivers of the Pacific Northwest.
Life is insanely robust, though we can make species go extinct, and this is the bad thing. So I always make the point that you can’t say, ‘Is it too late?’ That is the terrible question, because either answer promotes inaction. If it’s too late, you don’t need to act; if it’s not too late, you don’t need to act.
I don’t think of kids as a lower form of the human species.
In Buddhism, we talk of meditation as an act of awakening, to be awake to the fact that the earth is in danger and living species are in danger.
Scientists have always thought that because mammoths roamed such a huge territory – from Western Europe to Central North America – that North American woolly mammoths were a sideshow of no particular significance to the evolution of the species.
Models are people. A lot of people like to make us some species that are not human; we are normal people.
We definitely don’t want to go through another Ice Age or another natural cycle of global warming. Both happen over a long period of time. It would be disastrous for our civilization, and not just for us but many other species.
Unfortunately, with dinosaurs, we haven’t had enough specimens to determine how much variation there is within a species.
The struggle to save every possible species and ecosystem from the current wave of destruction is worthwhile. One day, perhaps within our lifetimes, they could repopulate a thriving world.
We’re under some gross misconception that we’re a good species, going somewhere important, and that at the last minute we’ll correct our errors and God will smile on us. It’s delusion.
The truth is that from birth on we are, to one extent or another, a fairly sensual species.
In fact, if you think hard about it, animal conservation should actually be anathema to the Darwin-loving liberal agenda, which holds up evolution – and not altruistic compassion – as the final word on the survival of a species.
The acquisition of literacy is one of the most important epigenetic achievements of Homo sapiens. To our knowledge, no other species ever acquired it.
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.
The shark is the apex predator in the sea. Sharks have molded evolution for 450 million years. All fish species that are prey to the sharks have had their behavior, their speed, their camouflage, their defense mechanisms molded by the shark.
I think when you work on fossils, and you realize that a species is there, and it’s abundant for quite a long period of time, and then at some point it’s no longer there – and so, when you look at that bigger picture, yes, you realize that either you change and adapt, or, as a species, you go extinct.
The mineral world is a much more supple and mobile world than could be imagined by the science of the ancients. Vaguely analogous to the metamorphoses of living creatures, there occurs in the most solid rocks, as we now know, perpetual transformation of a mineral species.
It’s fair to say when you go out and walk in the woods or on a beach, the most conspicuous forms of life you will see are plants and animals, and certainly there’s a huge diversity of those types of organisms, perhaps 10 million animal species and several hundred thousand plant species.
As I like to say, the entire collective memory of the species – that means all known and recorded information – is going to be just a few keystrokes away in a matter of years.
As a species, taking all in all, we are still too young, too juvenile, to be trusted. We have spread across the face of the earth in just a few thousand years, no time at all as evolution clocks time, covering all livable parts of the planet, endangering other forms of life, and now threatening ourselves.
We have to initiate a bio-shield movement along the coastal areas by raising mangrove forests, plantations of casuarina, salicornia, laucaena, atriplex, palms, bamboo and other tree species and halophytes – all that can grow near the sea.
As members of a social species endowed with large brains, we are natural-born marketers. Capitalism, the economic system that has elevated innumerable people out of abject poverty and misery, is founded on marketing. Everything that defines your daily existence has the indelible marks of marketing on it.
If my grandchildren were to look at me and say, ‘You were aware species were disappearing and you did nothing, you said nothing’, that I think is culpable. I don’t know how much more they expect me to be doing, I’d better ask them.
Alpacas are much more biddable creatures. Llamas are horrible. As a species, it’s probably for the best that they’re wary of us. But on a personal level, I find it very hard to come to terms with.
When most of us hear the phrase, ‘survival of the fittest,’ we assume it originated with Charles Darwin. It did not. The phrase doesn’t exist anywhere in Darwin’s first edition of ‘Origin of the Species.’
The linear, single species idea of farming is an assault on ecological function. Something’s going to break down in that system – anything from soil structure, in economics… but where to start is with true ecological function.
I think as a species we’re not designed to be able to think more than one year into the future – if that. Even trying to imagine one year from now makes most people feel like they’ve been given a huge boring chunk of homework that’s too hard to do.
Each person is an idiom unto himself, an apparent violation of the syntax of the species.
Closely related species of birds are also chromosomally similar.
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.
Certainly it is wrong to be cruel to animals and the destruction of a whole species can be a great evil. The capacity for feelings of pleasure and pain and for the form of life of which animals are capable clearly impose duties of compassion and humanity in their case.
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.
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.
Once we become a multiplanet species, our chances to live long and prosper will take a huge leap skyward.
A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning.
When a cocker spaniel bites, it does so as a member of its species; it is never anything but a dog. When a pit bull bites, it does so as a member of its breed. A pit bull is never anything but a pit bull.
Time and time again, our species has escaped existential threats by reinventing ourselves, finding new skills not coded in our genes to survive new challenges not previously encountered.
Whenever one reads of the determination of the species, or opens a book on natural science and history, in whatever language, one inevitably comes across the name of Linne.
It was an overwhelming moment to perform in Bishkek, Kyrgyz Republic. Dia Mirza and I were the celebrity ambassadors for India International Snow Leopard Conservation Forum. I even met the Russian president; all of us pledged to save snow leopards and other endangered species.
On the ordinary view of each species having been independently created, we gain no scientific explanation.
Whether you like the look or not, that tailcoat is a tough shell, a suit of armour. The posh boy is a hardy species.
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 we progress as a species, we will unlock new means for enhancing our lives at every turn – and our conceptions of wealth and poverty will evolve in tandem.
We’re a fast-moving, needy species.
Mankind is considered (by the radical environmentalists) the lowest and the meanest of all species and is blamed for everything.
Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species – if separate species we be – for its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loosed upon the world.
I’ve found cinnamon to be very effective for lowering the glycemic response to meals. People have heard that before, but I didn’t realize how profound it could be until I did the actual testing with continuous glucose monitors. And I tested all different varieties and species of cinnamon from Ceylon to Saigon.
The Ocean Health Index is like the thermometer of the ocean. It will allow us to take the temperature to know what is going on at the global level, trying to integrate different impacts, including overfishing, invasive species, coastal development, and climate change.
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.
When our natural habitats become overrun by species that are not native to these areas, they can damage the environment, pose health risks, and even hurt our local economy.
The fate of the vast majority of species on this planet has been extinction, eventually.
I like L.A., but I think what’s changed is that the kinds of films I do, the mid-range dramatic film, has become an endangered species.
Notwithstanding the supposed egalitarian ethos of some hunter-gatherer societies, humans are a hierarchical social species. We care greatly about where we stand in comparison to some relevant reference group.
Taught to regard a part of our own Species in the most abject and contemptible Degree below us, we lose that Idea of the dignity of Man which the Hand of Nature had implanted in us, for great and useful purposes.
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.
How do you know Hollywood is getting serious about video games? They want to make one of their own. In ‘Defiance,’ the remaining humans on Earth, as well as alien species looking for a new home, find themselves settling for peace after a massive war desecrated the world and destroyed most of the alien ships along with it.
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.
Under the species of Syndicalism and Fascism there appears for the first time in Europe a type of man who does not want to give reasons or to be right, but simply shows himself resolved to impose his opinions.
Corporate corruption has ecological merits. It’s helping to preserve that species known as Democrats – thought to be endangered as recently as the year 2000.
I have heard endlessly that fish are so resilient that there is no way that you could exterminate a species. We are learning otherwise.
My first attempts to transmit typhus to laboratory animals, including the smaller species of monkeys, had failed, as had those of my predecessors, for reasons which I can easily supply today.
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.
My heart is broken in the face of the stupidity of my species.
In a free market and in the absence of planning, developers will flatten every hillside, fill every canyon, obliterate every endangered species, and pave over every wetland they think they can make a buck on.
I’m not looking ahead joyfully to the rest of my life or the future of the human race. I’ve always written about man as an animal species among other animals, competing for limited resources. Our population is exploding. Our environment is dying. Science has debunked God.
I am never interested in the individual, but in the human species and its environment.
An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so.
I feel that we have a responsibility to try to do everything we can to protect species, and the best way to do that is to uphold international conservation law.
I beg you be persuaded that no one would be more zealous than myself to establish effectual barriers against the horrors of spiritual tyranny, and every species of religious persecution.
One of the basic steps in saving a threatened species is to learn more about it: its diet, its mating and reproductive processes, its range patterns, its social behavior.
The hierarchy of relations, from the molecular structure of carbon to the equilibrium of the species and ecological whole, will perhaps be the leading idea of the future.
Oh, those golden-yellow eyes of the wolf! You can feel yourself being pulled in. I knew I had been accepted – and that I had spoken to another species.
I am a worrier. I worry about the state of our country, of the world, of our species. Every day seems to deliver a new nail to hammer into our collective coffin.
Eat a wide variety of species.
The story of our species is one of overcoming existential risk through new forms of cooperation and innovation.
If epic poetry is a definite species, the sagas do not fall within it.
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.
While many alien species are harmless, others pose expensive threats to seas and fields and forests.
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 don’t protect our young, and we tolerate predators of our own species.
There are certain books in the world which every searcher for truth must know: the Bible, the Critique of Pure Reason, the Origin of Species, and Karl Marx’s Capital.
We are surely the primary agent of death for all members of the cat tribe. For many if not most cat species, our depredations must surpass accidents, disease, and even starvation by a considerable margin.
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.
In our lifetime, we’re going to see fifty percent of the world’s species go extinct. We’re already seeing this radical rise in the world’s temperature that was predicted.
Moreover, the concern of some that moving DNA among species would breach customary breeding barriers and have profound effects on natural evolutionary processes has substantially disappeared as the science revealed that such exchanges occur in nature.
As in all of biology, comparative studies showing differences among species are often helpful for a better understanding of the basic mechanisms; with all its advantages, there is a danger of clinging exclusively to one model organism.
We’re such a funky species. We’re so violent, so greedy – this is how we roll. But what are we going to do about it? How do we move forward given who we are? Because situations don’t come out of nothing. They come out of certain conditions.
The British ballads became a new kind of form in their hand. And out of them came the blues, a new kind of song of commentary and satire, a song form which, after all, has become the main musical form of the whole human species.
What we are doing to the future of our children, and the other species on the planet, is a clear moral issue.
We can understand, too, that natural species are chosen not because they are ‘good to eat’ but because they are ‘good to think.’
What the fossil record does do is to force us to contemplate our place on the planet. We are but one species of several hominids that inhabited Planet Earth, and like our distant cousins who went extinct fairly recently, our time on Planet Earth is also finite.
The most dangerous infections of humans have always been those which have emerged from other species.
The only way we can reduce the number of these endangered species is to improve and provide additional habitat where they can live and reproduce.
It is hard to explain the huge variety of diatoms – a microorganism that has 100,000 species – in terms of natural selection.
There’s a lot of cruelty going on all the time, and I’m not just talking about inter-human cruelty. I’m talking about whole species becoming extinct, asteroids hitting planets, black holes gobbling up stars.
Well, there are without doubt species of jellyfish around the world that are potentially lethal to human beings, some of which shut beaches for entire seasons. The box jellyfish of Australasia is officially the world’s most venomous creature, and has killed swimmers in the past.
The hallmark of the human species is great adaptability.
When I went to college, I really became interested in cultural anthropology. Our behavior isn’t that different from other primate species’.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.
We’re all born storytellers. It’s part of the species. But, more specifically, I suppose a particular combination of sensitivity and trauma made me a writer: an essential disquiet with reality, which required exploration through portrayal.
There are so many ways to characterize evolutionary success. If one criterion is the number of millions of years that the species persists, we’re still just infants. We’re way too young of a species to tell if we were a creative fluke or if we have any staying power.
There are three species of government: republican, monarchical, and despotic.
I’m an animal rights activist because I believe we won’t have a planet if we continue to behave toward other species the way we do.
The real problem with the art world is not the money men scavenging in its wake – they’ve always been there – but the pirates who’ve taken over the ship. I am thinking, of course, of that awful art world species: the curator.
The thought that we’re in competition with Russians or with Chinese is all a mistake, and trivial. We are one species, with a world to win.
I suggest that going to Mars means permanence on the planet – a mission by which we are building up a confidence level to become a two-planet species.
The only thing that can save us as a species is seeing how we’re not thinking about future generations in the way we live.
Consider: Life arose on Earth close to four billion years ago. Four billion years of slithering, swimming, and soaring life forms. But only in the last 200 thousand years has a species arisen that can fathom the laws of nature and build hardware able to signal its presence.
In every advanced mammalian species that survives and thrives, a common anthropological characteristic is the fierce behavior of the adult female of the species when she senses a threat to her cubs. The lioness, the tigress and the mama bear are all examples.
There’s nothing good about ash dieback, but there is one useful thing that could be done: wherever possible, leave the dead trees to stand. There is more life in a dead tree than in a living tree: around 2,000 animal species in the UK rely on dead or dying wood for their survival.
The only way to save a rhinoceros is to save the environment in which it lives, because there’s a mutual dependency between it and millions of other species of both animals and plants.
I’m trying to make perfect moments. And those generate meaning. If you go deep enough in how to make a moment, very quickly you come to how narrative works – to what we are as a species, how we’ve come up with telling stories in scenes and images.
Although we have, in theory, abolished human slavery, recognized women’s rights, and stopped child labor, we continue to enslave other species who, if we simply pay attention, show quite clearly that they experience parental love, pain, and the desire for freedom, just as we do.
Evolutionary science kind of bears that out: When species are rivals and competing for space and resources, the superior one wins. Nature has no compunction about that; it just is.
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.
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?
If we can move together as a species, I think that there is a possibility that we can make the world a better place.
Animals need to understand other species, if only to prey on them or escape from them.
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.
What sweetens the deal for me is that I get to develop an alien species from the ground up. I’m playing Saru, a Kelpian, and this race has never been seen before in any ‘Star Trek’ series.
Well I think on a simple ecological level that the diversity of this planet is important for our survival, that all of our different cultures, people are important to the health of the whole the same way that a species of animal should be saved and at a simple ecology level.
People can’t get their heads round the idea of a species surviving; you know, they’re more concerned about how you treat a donkey in Sicily or something.
It is interesting that the U.S. has this very strong proportion of the population that rejects scientific conclusions about the age of the Earth and about evolutionary relationships between species, including humans.
Species can be recognized by their morphological characteristics and songs.
But it really wasn’t until three to four years later, when we had an opportunity in the lab to make very detailed observations, and comparisons with other fossil discoveries, that we realized she was a new species of human ancestor.
What part of 9/11 is big? If the future continues to reinterpret the past, it could be argued that 9/11 provides irrefutable proof that unless there is some other way that we learn to deal with our technology or deal with our brothers and sisters, it is goodbye as a species. That genie does not leave that bottle.
We’re the first technology-creating species. We use technology to extend our reach. We didn’t stay in the caves, and we haven’t stayed on the planet. To play jazz with our genomes and the universe might ultimately be what we’re all about.
The astounding variety of foods on offer in the modern supermarket obscures the fact that the actual number of species in the modern diet is shrinking. For reasons of economics, the food industry prefers to tease its myriad processed offerings from a tiny group of plant species, corn and soybeans chief among them.
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.
Discovering new species is a passion. A day without collecting plants is painful for me.
If it’s true that our species is alone in the universe, then I’d have to say the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little.
Our species uses music and dance to express various feelings: love, joy, comfort, ceremony, knowledge, and friendship. And each one is distinct and widely recognized within cultures. Love songs cause us to move slowly and fluidly, for example, while songs of joy inspire us to dance in a full-body aerobic way.
Habitats keep evolving new pageants of species, and we shouldn’t interfere.
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.
It has long been a fact familiar to geologists, that, both on the east and west coasts of the central part of Scotland, there are lines of raised beaches, containing marine shells of the same species as those now inhabiting the neighbouring sea.
Comedians really are like a species. That’s not to be exclusive. Anyone can kind of become one. You have to pay your dues, though.
We are the only species on the planet without full employment. Brilliant.
Twenty-five years ago my two main target species were goliath tigerfish and arapaima from the Amazon. Each took me six years to track down and catch, over the course of three expeditions to the Congo and six to the Amazon.
Mr. Darwin refers to the multitude of the individual of every species, which, from one cause or another, perish either before, or soon after attaining maturity.
We are a profoundly interconnected species, as the global economic and ecological crises reveal in vivid and frightening detail. We must embrace the simple fact that we are dependent on and accountable to one another.
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.
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 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.
It’s no longer an exaggeration to say that middle-class Americans are an endangered species.
Indeed, I was unable to find any evidence whatsoever of the occurrence of a drastic evolutionary acceleration and genetic reconstruction in widespread, populous species.
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.
For almost two centuries, American gray wolves, vilified in fact as well as fiction, were the victims of vicious government extermination programs. By the time the Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973, only a few hundred of these once-great predators were left in the lower 48 states.
Fungi are the grand recyclers of the planet and the vanguard species in habitat restoration.
If you based your knowledge of the human species exclusively on adverts, you’d think that the normal condition of humanity was to be a good-looking single person between 20 and 35, with excellent muscle-definition and/or an excellent figure, and a large disposable income.
There’s money to be made by driving a species extinct.
The reason humans experience so much more stress than other species isn’t just because we think more, but also because we think differently.
The Endangered Species Act was designed to preserve biodiversity, not enrich trial lawyers and political activists.
Just as your own existence is unlikely and far from inevitable, the evolution of modern humans as a species depended on a whole string of chance events – some happening in the environments our ancestors inhabited, and some inside their own bodies, including random mutations in their DNA.
We’ve almost been wiped out as a species many times, going back millions of years, and we’ve survived by reinventing ourselves and enlarging our circles of awareness, inventing new technologies and social structures.
The Anthropocentic Age – the first age in which humankind is the dominant species on the planet – cuts both ways: it is up to us to destroy or save the planet. We certainly have the ability.
Humans are a social species more than any other, and in order to build a community, which for some reason humans have to do in order to live, we have to solve the communication problem. Language is the tool that was invented to solve that problem.
There is no good scientific reason to bring back an extinct species. Why would one bring them back? To put them in a theme park?
Selective memory is surely one of nature’s most effective ways of ensuring the survival of our species.
You should know as much as you can about the human species if you have a hand in designing human society.
Where we are going as a species is a big question. Human evolution certainly hasn’t stopped. Every time individuals produce a new zygote, there’s a reshuffling and recombination of genes. And we don’t know where all of that is going to take us.
My own hope is that, as a human species, we are on a long journey of evolution toward increasingly more tolerant and nonviolent behavior.
Human beings are remarkably resilient. When you think about it, our species has been teetering upon the edge of the existential cliff since Hiroshima. In short, we endure.
As a species, we’ve always been discoverers and adventurers, and space and the deep ocean are some of the last frontiers.
The notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.
There are many ways for organisms to probe the external world. Some smell it, others listen to it, many see it. Each species, therefore, lives in its own unique sensory world of which other species may be partially or totally unaware.
I readily admit it is easy to make of horses what we will. Silent, in some ways reserved, they allow us to train them, and to project our ideas upon them; to ride and drive them, and to make them symbolic, perhaps to a greater degree than any other species.
You know when you work with animals you have to do so very carefully, species by species.
Moreover, all our knowledge of organic remains teaches us, that species have a definite existence, and a centralization in geological time as well as in geographical space, and that no species is repeated in time.
Species co-evolve with the other species they eat, and very often, a relationship of interdependence develops: I’ll feed you if you spread around my genes. A gradual process of mutual adaptation transforms something like an apple or a squash into a nutritious and tasty food for a hungry animal.
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.
The story of Noah is self-contradictory, uncorroborated by independent historical evidence, and is generally at odds with everything we know about our planet’s geology, biology, and species diversity.
We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion.
The Endangered Species Act is the strongest and most effective tool we have to repair the environmental harm that is causing a species to decline.
I think future engineered species could be the source of food, hopefully a source of energy, environmental remediation and perhaps replacing the petrochemical industry.
I’m hoping to make a new thing for the world that remains in the mind like a new species of living thing.
Man is more than merely an animal to exist and propagate his species. His mind gives him capacity to search out the great truths in God’s arrangement and this lifts him far above the other animal creation.
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.
CRISPR-enabled ‘gene drives’ enable us to make changes to the germ-line of organisms permanent such that changes spread through the entire wild population, including making species extinct on demand. Unlike nuclear weapons such technologies are not complex, expensive, and able to be kept secret for a long time.
A few dozen changes to the genome of a modern elephant – to give it subcutaneous fat, woolly hair and sebaceous glands – might suffice to create a variation that is functionally similar to the mammoth. Returning this keystone species to the tundras could stave off some effects of warming.
If you want to see an endangered species, get up and look in the mirror.
The relation of the individual person to the species he belongs to is the most intimate of all relations.
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.
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.
We don’t need to clear the 4 to 6 percent of the Earth’s surface remaining in tropical rain forests, with most of the animal and plant species living there.
I am a closet birdwatcher. I can identify Southern African species, but it irks me I can barely tell a jay from a blackbird in the U.K.
Molecules A and B meet, marry, and beget the species. This takes place in one-millionth of a billionth of a second. This is a fundamental process in nature, and the world was looking for a way to be able to see the process. But many brilliant people said it couldn’t be done.
As much horror as we have always created, we are a species that keeps moving forward, seeing new sights in new ways, and enjoying the journey.
The rapidly spinning blades of wind turbines act like an apex predator that big birds never evolved to deal with. And because big birds have much lower reproductive rates than small birds, their deaths have a far greater impact on the overall population of the species.
There are some species, one was the Goliath Tigerfish, that took me six years to track down and catch.
Heaven and hell suppose two distinct species of men, the good and the bad. But the greatest part of mankind float betwixt vice and virtue.
I didn’t know exactly what a hipster was until we were in Brooklyn. It’s like a species. On first seeing it, I was like, ‘Oh my God, oh my God…’ Pre-tt-y fun-ny.
Conservation of any endangered species must begin with stringent efforts to protect its natural habitat by the enforcement of rigid legislation against human encroachment into parks and other game sanctuaries.
The mode of consciousness of nonhuman species is quite different from human consciousness.
I thought we’d just sequence the genome once and that would be sufficient for most things in people’s lifetimes. Now we’re seeing how changeable and adaptable it is, which is why we’re surviving and evolving as a species.
A race is what zoologists term a variety or subdivision of a species.
We are inhabited by as many as ten thousand bacterial species; these cells outnumber those which we consider our own by ten to one, and weigh, all told, about three pounds – the same as our brain.
Every decently-made object, from a house to a lamp post to a bridge, spoon or egg cup, is not just a piece of ‘stuff’ but a physical embodiment of human energy, testimony to the magical ability of our species to take raw materials and turn them into things of use, value and beauty.
Take the crocodile, for example, my favorite animal. There are 23 species. Seventeen of those species are rare or endangered. They’re on the way out, no matter what anyone does or says, you know.
Empty heads, cognitive science has taught us, learn nothing. The powerful cultural and personal flexibility of our species is owed at least in part to our starting off so well-informed; we are good learners because we know what to pay attention to and what questions are the right ones to ask.
For millions of years, this world has been a great gift to nearly everything living on it, a planet whose atmosphere, temperature, air, water, seasons, and weather were precisely calibrated to allow us – the big us, including forests and oceans, species large and small – to flourish.
If you think about it, every single species is endangered. Homo sapiens at the front of the line, mosquitoes and lawyers at the back.
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.
