Favorite quotes about life, death and evolution

“Life is. It goes. And it does not count. That was the hurtling truth that comes to rattle everyone as they grow up, grow old.”

Jim Crace, Being Dead

(quoted in a book review in Men’s Journal, March 2000, p. 56)

"The meaning of life is that it ends."

Franz Kafka

“It is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

“There’s no way to explain human beings. We shouldn’t be on this planet.”

Ancient Aliens (the History Channel)

“It is a good thing to have been man.”

Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon

(Quote is from narrator as the sun is

going nova two billion years from now.)

God is an invention of Man. So the nature of God is only a shallow mystery. The deep mystery is the nature of Man.

Nanrei Kobon, late Abbott of

the Temple of the Shining Dragon,

a Buddhist sanctuary in Kyoto.

(Quoted in Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors by

Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan)

Death, as they say, is a blunt instrument. Death is not justice. Nobody goes to heaven. There are no different kinds of hell. Whatever precedes it – surrounded by family, the sounds and screams of battle, enhanced interrogation, the sustained agony of aggressive disease, the lonely walk into the woods with a shotgun – one moment you are there and then you’re not. Not anywhere. Not anything.

Peter A. Hempel – 10-16

“I was a nurse in the ER. I’ve seen people die. To me, death is a kind of non-event. One moment you’re there, the next moment you’re not.”

Cathy Lynn Scruggs – 1996

Death is the evaluator. Death moves among the chances, choosing. Out of the cosmos would come only chaos; out of all the collisions of ray and gene, purposeless and senseless, changeful and unevaluated, would come only mediocrity’s wriggling mass, but death steps in. And death chooses: the wise from the silly, the pointed from the pointless, the fiery from the faint. Death stalks the fish eggs, the seedlings, the foetuses. Death is a leopard that sees in the dark. Death is a goshawk, a glacier, a serpent; a wind from the desert, a dispute among friends, a plague of locusts or viruses, a tiring of species. Chance proposes. Death disposes. The odour of jasmine may scent the night, and the conversation of mockingbirds may come to my window. I may ponder a thesis or comfort a child. We should all be lost in the wilderness of chance had not death, through a billion choosings, created the world I know.

(Robert Ardrey, African Genesis)

Had man been born of a fallen angel, then the contemporary predicament would lie as far beyond solution as it would lie beyond explanation. Our wars and our atrocities, our crimes and our quarrels, our tyrannies and our injustices could be ascribed to nothing other than singular human achievement. And we should be left with a clear-cut portrait of man as a degenerate being endowed at birth with virtue’s treasury whose only notable talent has been to squander it. But we were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties, whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres however frequently they may be converted into battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished? The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.

(Robert Ardrey, African Genesis)

“When I really look at a meadow,…I’m not sure that it isn’t filled with battle screams, piercing cries of hate, terror, and pain, individuals and tribes fighting for nutrition, for light, for space, for carbon dioxide, for bacteria, for fungi; that it doesn’t echo with the howl of the winners and losers, the songs of the nascent and the hymns of the dying – non-audible, vegetable cries….There’s no reason to endow plants with a tenderness that is lacking elsewhere.”

Shedding Life: Disease, Politics,

and Other Human Conditions

Moroslav Holub

Nature is neither kind nor unkind. She is neither against suffering, nor for it. Nature is not interested in suffering one way or the other unless it affects the survival of DNA. It is easy to imagine a gene that, say, tranquillises gazelles when they are about to suffer a killing bite. Would such a gene be favored by natural selection? Not unless the act of tranquillising a gazelle improve that gene’s chances of being propagated into future generations. It is hard to see why this should be so and we may therefore guess that gazelles suffer horrible pain and fear when they are pursued unto the death – as most of them eventually are. The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease. It must be so. If there is ever a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored.

Richard Dawkins,

The Greatest Show on Earth, page 390

The appointment of death by the agency of carnivora, as the ordinary termination of animal existence, appears therefore in its main results to be a dispensation of benevolence; it deducts much from the aggregate amount of the payment of universal death; it abridges, and almost annihilates, throughout the brute creation, the misery of disease, and accidental injuries, and lingering decay; and imposes such salutary restraint upon excessive increase of numbers, that the supply of food maintains perpetually a due ratio to the demand. The result is, that the surface of the land and depths of the water are ever crowded with myriads of animated beings, the pleasures of whose life are coextensive with its duration; and which throughout the little day of existence that is allotted to them, fulfill with joy the function for which there were created.

Rev. William Buckland (a leading 19th century geologist)

Cited by Stephen Jay Gould, and borrowed from his citation by Richard Dawkins,

The Greatest Show on Earth, p. 396

A society is a group of unequal beings organized to meet common needs.

In any sexually reproducing species, equality of individuals is a natural impossibility. Inequality must therefore be regarded as the first law of social materials, whether in human or other societies. Equality of opportunity must be regarded among vertebrate societies as the second law. Insect societies may include genetically determined casts, but among backboned creatures this cannot be. Every vertebrate born, excepting only in a few rare species, is granted equal opportunity to display his genius or to make a fool out of himself.

While a society of equals – whether baboons or jackdaws, lions or man – is a natural impossibility, a just society is a realizable goal. Since the animal, unlike the human being, is seldom tempted by the pursuit of the impossible, its societies are seldom denied the realizable.

The just society as I see it is one in which sufficient order protects members, whatever their diverse endowments, and sufficient disorder provides every individual with full opportunity to develop his genetic endowment, whatever that may be. It is this balance of order and disorder, varying in rigor according to environmental hazard, that I think of as the social contract. And that it is a biological command will become evident, I believe, as we inquire among species.

Violation of biological commands has been the failure of social man. Vertebrates though we may be, we have ignored the law of equal opportunity since civilization’s earliest hours. Sexually reproducing beings though we are, we pretend today that the law of inequality does not exist. And enlightened though we may be, while we pursue the unattainable we make impossible the realizable.

Robert Ardrey, The Social Contract

There is aggressiveness, arising from the competition of beings without which natural selection could not take place. There is violence, that form of aggressiveness which employs or effectively threatens the use of physical force. And there is war, that particular form of organized violence taking place between groups.

Not for money and not for space, neither for women nor a table in heaven do men seek to best one another. We obey a law that, for all we know, may be as ancient as life on this planet. We seek self-fulfillment. Within the limits and the directions of our individual genetic endowment we seek such a state of satisfaction as will inform us as to why we were born. We have no true choice. The force that presses on us is as large as all vital processes, and were it not so, then life would return to the swamp. If there is hope for men, it is because we are animals.

This is a aggressiveness that many would deny. It is the inborn force that stimulates the hickory tree, searching for the sun, to rise above its fellows. It is the inborn force that presses the rose bush to provide us with blossoms. It is the force, brooking no contradiction, directing the elephant calf to grow up, the baby starfish to grow out, the infant mamba to grow long. It is the implacable force which commands the normal human child to abandon its mother’s protective shadow and to join the human adventure.

Robert Ardrey, The Social Contract

“...the natural tendency of our bet-hedging primordial gonad is to develop as an ovary if nothing intervenes; something extra, a Y chromosome, is required to change it into a testis.... As the endocrinologist Alfred Jost put it, “Becoming a male is a prolonged, uneasy, and risky venture; it is a kind of struggle against inherent trends towards femaleness.” Chauvinists might go further and hail becoming a man as heroic, and becoming a woman as the easy fallback position. Conversely, one might regard womanhood as the natural state of humanity, with men just a pathological aberration that must regrettably be tolerated as the price for making more women. I prefer merely to acknowledge that a Y chromosome switches gonad development from the ovarian path to the testicular path, and to draw no metaphysical conclusions.”

Jared Diamond, Why is Sex Fun? (Diamond, a sociobiologist, is also the author of The Third Chimpanzee, a broad-based

study of human nature)