Species Quotes
A single-continent world would be expected to contain only about a third as many mammalian species as currently exist.
Elizabeth Kolbert
I firmly believe that mathematics does not exist outside of humans. It is something we, as a species, invent.
Keith Devlin
The more species we look at, the more, frankly, we find that humans are not exceptional here.
Eric Lander
If the organisms in a species now have trait T, and this trait now helps those organisms to survive and reproduce because the trait has effect E, a natural hypothesis to consider is that T evolved in the lineage leading to those current organisms because T had effect E. This hypothesis is "natural," but it often isn't true!
Elliott Sober
Man's condition is horrible because, no matter what form his happiness may take, it arises from some species of ignorance.
Honore de Balzac
There exists above the "productive" man a yet higher species.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Hatred is the spiritual malignancy of our species, and like any other form of cancer, does its most terrible work not outwardly, but from within us.
Marianne Williamson
Man, by his very nature, tends to give himself an explanation of the world into which he is born. And this is what distinguishes him from the other species. Every individual, even the least intelligent, the lowest of outcasts, from childhood on gives himself some explanation of the world. And with it he manages to live. And without it, he would sink into madness.
Elsa Morante
If you want to preserve your virginity, it's about not wanting to belong to the human species.
Catherine Breillat
I should consent to breed under pressure, if I were convinced in any way of the reasonableness of reproducing the species. But my nerves and the nerves of any woman I could live with three months, would produce only a victim... lacking in impulse, a mere bundle of discriminations. If I were wealthy I might subsidize a stud of young peasants, or a tribal group in Tahiti.
Ezra Pound
Erwin estimated that the tropics were home to as many as thirty million species of arthropods.
Elizabeth Kolbert
Ignorance produced genera, and science produced, and will continue to produce, proper names; nor of these shall we be afraid to increase the number, whenever we shall have occasion to denote different species.
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon
There is nothing more mysterious than destiny - of a person, of our species, of our planet, or of the universe itself.
Brian Swimme
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.
Richard Owen
A forest of all manner of trees is poor, if not disagreeable, in effect; a mass of one species of tree is sublime.
John Ruskin
Both classically- and romantically-minded spirits-inasmuch as these two species always exist-occupy themselves with a vision of the future: but the former do so out of a strength of their age, the latter out of its weakness.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I feel that one species, mankind, doesn't have the right to exterminate.
Ernst Mayr
Group selection and individual selection are just two of the selection processes that have played important roles in evolution. There also is selection within individual organisms (intragenomic conflict), and selection among multi-species communities (an idea that now is getting attention in work on the human microbiome). All four of these levels of selection find a place in multi-level selection theory.
Elliott Sober
