Ancestry Quotes - Page 8

• Darwin repeatedly used the hypothesis of common ancestry as a platform on which to build his various ideas about testing hypotheses concerning natural selection. He also argued that adaptive similarities provide little or no evidence for common ancestry. Although this second claim needs to be fine-tuned, Darwin was right that ample evidence for common ancestry can exist even if none of the characteristics we observe were caused to evolve by natural selection.

  Elliott Sober

  Ideas, Littles, Needs

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The big picture, I think, is that common ancestry is evidentially prior to natural selection in Darwin's theory and in contemporary evolutionary biology as well.

  Elliott Sober

  Thinking, Common, Biology

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Various random experiments, cut-ups, fold-ins, juxtapositions, timed writings of other kinds, the "objects assignment" which involves dream, adventure, ancestry. Writing outside, writing on moving vehicles. Looking at paintings in the grand museums of the world in a proscribed way.Little strategies to keep the lalita - play or dance - going. Sometimes it's lonely you know, just you and your own imagination.

  Anne Waldman

  Dream, Lonely, Moving

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

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• How I hate the man who talks about the 'brute creation', with an ugly emphasis on Brute. Only Christians are capable of it. As for me, I am proud of my close kinship with other animals. I take a jealous pride in my Simian ancestry. I like to think that I was once a magnificent hairy fellow living in the trees and that my frame has come down through geological time via sea jelly and worms and Amphioxus, Fish, Dinosaurs, and Apes. Who would exchange these for the pallid couple in the Garden of Eden?

  W.N.P. Barbellion

  Christian, Couple, Hate

  W. N. P. Barbellion (2017). “The Journal of a Disappointed Man”, p.35, Penguin UK

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• In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black. In Brazil, it's almost as if one drop of white ancestry makes you white.

  Henry Louis Gates

  White, America, Black

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• …Even the idea of a city never entered his mind. It was as if he had walked under the millimeter of haze just above the inked fibers of a map, that pure zone between land and chart, between distances and legends, between nature and storyteller. The place they had chosen to come to, to be their best selves, to be unconscious of ancestry. Here, apart from the sun compass and the odometer mileage, and the book, he was alone, his own invention. He knew during these times how the mirage worked, the fata morgana, for he was within it.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Distance, Book, Land

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• Watching a dog try to chew a large piece of toffee is a pastime fit for gods. Mr. Fusspot's mixed ancestry had given him a dexterity of jaw that was truly awesome. He somersaulted happily around the floor, making faces like a rubber gargoyle in a washing machine.

  Terry Pratchett

  Dog, Trying, Faces

  Terry Pratchett (2008). “Making Money: (Discworld Novel 36)”, p.141, Random House

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• Don't you dare take the lazy way. It's too easy to excuse yourself because of your ancestry. Don't let me catch you doing it! Now -- look close at me so you will remember. Whatever you do, it will be you who do.

  John Steinbeck

  Lazy, Looks, Way

  John Steinbeck (2002). “East of Eden”, p.392, Penguin

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• Mr L Prosser was, as they say, only human. In other words he was a carbon-based life form descended from an ape. More specifically he was forty, fat and shabby and worked for the local council. Curiously enough, though he didn't know it, he was also a direct male-line descendant of Genghis Khan, though intervening generations and racial mixing had so juggled his genes that he had no discernible Mongoloid characteristics, and the only vestiges left in Mr L Prosser of his mighty ancestry were a pronounced stoutness about the tum and a predilection for little fur hats.

  Douglas Adams

  Mixing, Males, Generations

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• I received a most amusing postcard the other morning. Unfortunately, it was not signed in a readable manner so I cannot answer it privately. But it comes from Moblie, Ala., and says: 'Dear Mrs. Roosevelt: You have not answered my question, the amount of Negro blood you have in your veins, if any.' I am afraid none of us know how much nor what kind of blood we have in our veins, since chemically it is all the same. And most of us cannot trace our ancestry more than a few generations.

  Eleanor Roosevelt

  Morning, Blood, Racism

  Eleanor Roosevelt (1991). “Eleanor Roosevelt's My Day: First lady of the world, her acclaimed columns, 1953-1962”

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• America today is running on the momentum of a godly ancestry, and when that momentum runs down, God help America.

  Omar N. Bradley

  Running, 4th Of July, Godly

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• We do not draw conclusions with our eyes, but with our reasoning powers, and if the whole of the rest of living nature proclaims with one accord from all sides the evolution of the world of organisms, we cannot assume that the process stopped short of Man. But it follows also that the factors which brought about the development of Man from his Simian ancestry must be the same as those which have brought about the whole of evolution.

  August Weismann

  Nature, Eye, Science

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• All scientists agree that evolution has occurred-that all life comes from a common ancestry, that there has been extinction, and that new taxa, new biological groups, have arisen. The question is, is natural selection enough to explain evolution? Is it the driver of evolution?

  Lynn Margulis

  Groups, Extinction, Common

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• Men have their intellectual ancestry, and the likeness of some one of them is forever unexpectedly flashing out in the features of a descendant, it may be after a gap of several centuries. In the parliament of the present every man represents a constituency of the past.

  James Russell Lowell

  Past, Men, Forever

  "The poetical works of John Keats. With a memoir, by James Russell Lowell" by John Keats, James Russell Lowell, New York: J. Miller, 1871.

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• It's just as hard for man to break the habit of thinking of himself as central to the species as it was to break the habit of thinking of himself as central to the universe. He sees himself quite unconsciously as the main line of evolution, with a female satellite revolving around him as the moon revolves around the earth. This not only causes him to overlook valuable clues to our ancestry, but sometimes leads him into making statements that are arrant and demonstrable nonsense.

  Elaine Morgan

  Moon, Men, Thinking

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• I'm crazy about Dublin. If you went back 3,000 years in my ancestry you wouldn't find a drop of Irish blood in the veins, but I love the place.

  Harold Prince

  Crazy, Blood, Years

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• I am one of the proudest men ever born, but let me tell you frankly, it is not for myself, but on account of my ancestry. The more I have studied the past, the more I have looked back, more and more has this pride come to me, and it has given me the strength and courage of conviction, raised me up from the dust of the earth, and set me working out that great plan laid out by those great ancestors of ours.

  Swami Vivekananda

  Motivational, Pride, Men

  Swami Vivekananda (2015). “Swami Vivekananda on Himself”, p.266, Advaita Ashrama

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• I've never felt grounded because of my ancestry or my gender. I think until women get away from that they're not going to be great writers.

  Patti Smith

  Thinking, Gender, Get Away

  Source: www.oceanstar.com

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• High birth is a thing which I never knew any one to disparage except those who had it not; and I never knew any one to make a boast of it who had anything else to be proud of.

  William Warburton

  Proud, Birth, Boast

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• It is a shame for a man to desire honor because of his noble progenitors, and not to deserve it by his own virtue.

  Saint John Chrysostom

  Men, Honor, Desire

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• Pedigrees seldom improve by age; the grandson is too often a weak infringement on the grandsire's parent.

  Josh Billings

  Parent, Age, Weak

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• The origin of all mankind was the same; it is only a clear and good conscience that makes a man noble, for that is derived from heaven itself.

  Seneca the Younger

  Men, Heaven, Noble

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• No man is nobler born than another, unless he is born with better abilities and a more amiable disposition. They who make such a parade with their family pictures and pedigrees, are, properly speaking, rather to be called noted or notorious than noble persons. I thought it right to say this much, in order to repel the insolence of men who depend entirely upon chance and accidental circumstances for distinction, and not at all on public services and personal merit.

  Seneca the Younger

  Men, Order, Noble

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• Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo---which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn't a stupendous badass was dead.

  Neal Stephenson

  Badass, Self, Numbers

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• Every time a crime was committed by a Muslim, that person's faith was mentioned, regardless of its relevance. When a crime is committed by a Christian, do they mention his religion? ... When a crime is committed by a black man, it's mentioned in the first breath: 'An African American man was arrested today...' But what about German Americans? Anglo Americans? A white man robs a convenience store and do we hear he's of Scottish descent? In no other instance is the ancestry mentioned.

  Dave Eggers

  Christian, Men, White Man

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