#natur

Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability. ↗

— Ronald Fisher

#exceedingly #generating #high #high degree #improbability

Natural selection is not evolution. ↗

— Ronald Fisher

#natural #natural selection #selection

Mind you, I cannot swear that my story is true. It may have been a dream; or worse, a symptom of some severe mental disorder. But I believe it is true. After all, how are we to know what things there are on earth? Strange monstrosities still exist, and foul, incredible perversions. Every war, each new geographical or scientific discovery, brings to light some new bit of ghastly evidence that the world is not altogether the same place we fondly imagine it to be. Sometimes peculiar incidents occur which hint of utter madness. How can we be sure that our smug conceptions of reality actually exist? To one man in a million dreadful knowledge is revealed, and the rest of us remain mercifully ignorant. There have been travelers who never came back, and research workers who disappeared. Some of those who did return were deemed mad because of what they told, and others sensibly concealed the wisdom that had so horribly been revealed. Blind as we are, we know a little of what lurks beneath our normal life. There have been tales of sea serpents and creatures of the deep; legends of dwarfs and giants; records of queer medical horrors and unnatural births. Stunted nightmares of men's personalities have blossomed into being under the awful stimulus of war, or pestilence, or famine. There have been cannibals, necrophiles, and ghouls; loathsome rites of worship and sacrifice; maniacal murders, and blasphemous crimes. When I think, then, of what I saw and heard, and compare it with certain other grotesque and unbelievable authenticities, I begin to fear for my reason. ("The Mannikin") ↗

— Robert Bloch

#occult #paranormal #rationalism-intellect #rationality #supernatural

Queen Latifah used to help me out with my kids, because while we were all out on tour - Public Enemy, Naughty By Nature, Queen Latifah, Heavy D - when Public Enemy went onstage, I didn't have anybody solid to watch my kids. So, Latifah would help me out. ↗

— Flavor Flav

#because #enemy #heavy #help #i

Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature. ↗

— Cyril Connolly

#classical #dead #dispute #distribution #emphasis

Each blade of grass has its spot on earth whence it draws its life, its strength; and so is man rooted to the land from which he draws his faith together with his life. ↗

— Joseph Conrad

#blade #draws #each #earth #faith

For all that has been said of the love that certain natures (on shore) have professed for it, for all the celebrations it has been the object of in prose and song, the sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness. ↗

— Joseph Conrad

#been #celebrations #certain #friendly #human

I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image. ↗

— Stephen Hawking

#about #computer #count #created #destructive

Long lives aren't natural. We forget that senior citizens are as much an invention as toasters or penicillin. ↗

— Doug Coupland

#forget #invention #lives #long #much

Thus happiness depends, as nature shows, less on exterior things than most suppose. ↗

— William Cowper

#exterior #happiness #less #most #nature