#evolutionary

Anthropologist Donald Symons is as amazed as we are at frequent attempts to argue that monogamous gibbons could serve as viable models for human sexuality, writing, "Talk of why (or whether) humans pair bond like gibbons strikes me as belonging to the same realm of discourse as talk of why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings. ↗

— Cacilda Jethá

#monogamy #science #science

Different sorts of survival machine appear very varied on the outside and in their internal organs. An octopus is nothing like a mouse, and both are quite different from an oak tree. Yet in their fundamental chemistry they are rather uniform, and, in particular, the replicators that they bear, the genes, are basically the same kind of molecule in all of us—from bacteria to elephants. We are all survival machines for the same kind of replicator—molecules called DNA— but there are many different ways of making a living in the world, and the replicators have built a vast range of machines to exploit them. A monkey is a machine that preserves genes up trees, a fish is a machine that preserves genes in the water; there is even a small worm that preserves genes in German beer mats. DNA works in mysterious ways. ↗

— Richard Dawkins

#science #science

The young man looked down from the cart at the people in front of him. Jonah felt his teacher’s eyes meet his own, and for a fraction of a second a smile played on the prisoner’s lips. Then he glanced toward heaven and spoke. “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country. ↗

— Anna Myers

#heroes #history #nathan-hale #patriotism #revolutionary-war

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Fill'd with death, ya pens'll hang ya. ↗

— Ron Swan

#revolutionary-war #death

We might possess every technological resource... but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be "revolutionary" but not transformative. ↗

— Adrienne Rich

#every #feeling #formless #inadequate #language

A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you... where and when and how you are living and might live, it is a wick of desire. ↗

— Adrienne Rich

#desire #even #how #kill #live

The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal. ↗

— Erich Fromm

#criminal #revolutionary #statesman #successful #unsuccessful

This would only come if you have a revolutionary change in technology like the jet brought about. ↗

— Adolf Galland

#brought #change #come #jet #like

You can't be a revolutionary, you can't want to change society if you don't love people, there's no point in it. ↗

— Myles Horton

#revolutionary #change

This is the war where we change. This is the trickster war. It's where we disappear, just like they desire us disappear. I spoke it you before: They wish us blank," he said, gesturing without thinking at Dr. Trefusis, who was the nearest exemplar of the white race. "They want us with no history and no memory. They want us empty as paper so they can write on us, so we ain't nothing but a price and an owner's name and a list of tasks. And that's what we'll give them. We'll give them your Nothing. We'll give them my William Williams and Henry Henry. We'll slip through and we'll change to who we must needs be and I will be all sly and have my delightful picaresque japes. But at the end of it, when it's over, I shall be one thing. I shall be one man, fixed, and not have to take no other name. I shall be one person steadily for some years." "This is why we got to win...If we ever wish to be one person, we got to win. ↗

— M.T. Anderson

#slaves #change