I think there's a collective consciousness around the world that there are things beyond our control that have the power to annihilate us, as a species, and it's all rather frightening.
Eat a wide variety of species.
I beg you be persuaded that no one would be more zealous than myself to establish effectual barriers against the horrors of spiritual tyranny, and every species of religious persecution.
At this early stage in our evolution, now through our infancy and into our childhood and then, with luck, our growing up, what our species needs most of all, right now, is simply a future.
Actually I do support a charity, DefendersofWildLife.org. They help protect endangered species.
There is a slight problem with being a conceptual artist these days: You won't get paid. But this levels the field and takes the art of money out of the field of serious art. The only conceptual artists who would conceive of making money on the Internet are a lowbrow species known as hustlers.
We're confronted with great darkness as a species right now as spiritual creatures on this planet. I don't think it's hopeless, and I don't want 'You've Never Seen Everything' to make people feel hopeless. But I think we've got to call a spade a spade.
The ability to write and read books is one of the things that transformed us as a species.
Bacteria live in unbelievable mixtures of hundreds or thousands of species. Like on your teeth. There are 600 species of bacteria on your teeth every morning.
Planting native species in our gardens and communities is increasingly important, because indigenous insects, birds and wildlife rely on them. Over thousands, and sometimes millions, of years they have co-evolved to live in local climate and soil conditions.
Closely related species of birds are also chromosomally similar.
There have to be reasons that you get up in the morning and you want to live. Why do you want to live? What's the point? What inspires you? What do you love about the future? If the future does not include being out there among the stars and being a multi-planet species, I find that incredibly depressing.
As a species, we've somehow survived large and small ice ages, genetic bottlenecks, plagues, world wars and all manner of natural disasters, but I sometimes wonder if we'll survive our own ingenuity.
I thought we'd just sequence the genome once and that would be sufficient for most things in people's lifetimes. Now we're seeing how changeable and adaptable it is, which is why we're surviving and evolving as a species.
Where we are going as a species is a big question. Human evolution certainly hasn't stopped. Every time individuals produce a new zygote, there's a reshuffling and recombination of genes. And we don't know where all of that is going to take us.
Cincinnati has one of the most diverse animal collections in the world, with more than 500 species represented. They also have a really good insect exhibit.
A mutt is a dog. He is the stuff of dogginess, a creature allied to species, not breed, and untrammeled by human hand or preference.
Much as I wish it were not so, we do live in a dangerous world. It has, in fact, always been this way. Our earliest ancestors had to worry about predators, natural disasters, disease, and - unique among our species - attacks by other people.
An asteroid can literally destroy 80 or 90 percent of the species that are alive on Earth. These are big events. I mean, this is called extinction.
Pre-history tells us that our species used to be a hunter-gatherer society. This means that the job of raising a family was split 50-50 between the men and the women - the man's 50 percent share was to sit in the woods with a sharp stick, waiting for something to hunt to wander by, and the woman's 50 percent was to do everything else.
What happens if you are the last (the very, very last) of your species, and you die - and humans notice? We live, increasingly, at a time when extinctions are recorded, remembered, and the last animal (or plant) in its line, by virtue of its being last, becomes a kind of celebrity. Its finality becomes a thing to honor.
I don't think you can impose limits on science because the very nature of homo sapiens is that he - she - is an inquisitive species. You can't control science. You have to control the effects of science.
I remember my first lecture on my first day in evolutionary biology, how populations and species change. I sat thinking, 'Why doesn't everyone know this?' I look back on it almost in horror: I came so close to not knowing how exciting our world is.
All the things that made us basically nasty, rapacious, competitive as a species are not necessarily hard-coded into whatever passes for the DNA of artificial intelligence.
I have heard endlessly that fish are so resilient that there is no way that you could exterminate a species. We are learning otherwise.
Measles and TB evolved from diseases of our cattle, influenza from a disease of pigs, and smallpox possibly from a disease of camels. The Americas had very few native domesticated animal species from which humans could acquire such diseases.
Removing substantial fuel loads from our forests helps prevent catastrophic fire and better protects species, watersheds and neighboring communities that call them home.
Every time you dive, you hope you'll see something new - some new species. Sometimes the ocean gives you a gift, sometimes it doesn't.
I read five books on the Constitution. My favorite was 'Plain, Honest Men' by Richard Beeman. I went on a science jag in the same way. I kept getting in arguments about evolution and being bested. So I read Charles Darwin's 'On the Origin of the Species,' a fantastic book that is not that difficult.
The mobile revolution has dramatically changed our world view, empowered women, and increased our empathy. Corrupt governments have been toppled and wars avoided because our species has become so digitally connected.
Atheism has been on the rise for years now, and the Bible of the atheists is 'The Origin of Species.'
The species will continue, whatever apocalypse we manage to unleash. It just won't be much fun to live through.
When, as an undergraduate, I began experiments on these slime molds in 1940, only one other person, Kenneth Raper, was working on them at that time. In fact, he discovered the model species Dictyostelium discoideum, which is the species used in the majority of the experimental work today.
With our evolved busy hands and our evolved busy brains, in an extraordinarily short period of time we've managed to alter the earth with such geologic-forcing effects that we ourselves are forces of nature. Climate change, ocean acidification, the sixth mass extinction of species.
It's Nixon who created the Environmental Protection Agency. Clean Air and Water Acts. Endangered Species Act. Promoted affirmative action. One could go on and on with Nixon as a New Deal liberal on domestic policy and a hawk, but one with great geo-political skills.
What we need is an electronic encyclopedia of life, with one page for each species. On each page is given everything known about that species.
