A Quote by Bill Nye
I'll admit that the discovery of evolution is humbling, but it is also empowering. It transforms our relationship to the life around us. Instead of being outsiders watching the natural world go by, we are insiders. We are part of the process; we are the exquisite result of billions of years of natural research and development.
Related Quotes
I don't know if most people have truly taken on board what this says about our place in the natural world. It doesn't mean that humans are dominating the Earth, ruling over all of nature. In fact, it is a reminder that we are only a tiny part of nature, at the mercy of a system whose operations predate us by billions of years, and will continue billions of years after we're gone.
Technology gets a bad rap for keeping us glued to our screens instead of being present with whomever is around us, and while this can be true, it also allows us to connect with billions of people all over the world. For free.
By contrast with history, evolution is an unconscious process. Another, and perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say that evolution is a natural process, history a human one.... Insofar as we treat man as a part of nature--for instance in a biological survey of evolution--we are precisely not treating him as a historical being. As a historically developing being, he is set over against nature, both as a knower and as a doer.
It is through science that we understand the world around us, and by understanding the world around us, we not only contribute to ourselves, our family, to our communities, etc. - you also contribute to the basic development and evolution of humanity.
Man wants to see nature and evolution as separate from human activities. There is a natural world, and there is man. But man also belongs to the natural world. If he is a ferocious predator, that too is part of evolution. If cod and haddock and other species cannot survive because man kills them, something more adaptable will take their place. Nature, the ultimate pragmatist, doggedly searches for something that works. But as the cockroach demonstrates, what works best in nature does not always appeal to us.
No other life forms know they are alive, and neither do they know they will die. This is our curse alone. Without this hex upon our heads, we would never have withdrawn as far as we have from the natural—so far and for such a time that it is a relief to say what we have been trying with our all not to say: We have long since been denizens of the natural world. Everywhere around us are natural habitats, but within us is the shiver of startling and dreadful things. Simply put: We are not from here. If we vanished tomorrow, no organism on this planet would miss us. Nothing in nature needs us.
Our incredible bewilderment (wilderness separation) blinds us from seeing that our many personal and global problems primarily result from our assault of and separation from the natural creation process within and around us. Our estrangement from nature leaves us wanting,and when we want there is never enough. Our insatiable wanting is called greed. It is a major source of our destructive dependencies and violence.
The discovery and investigation of life on other planets is likely to change many of our ideas about how life arose on the Earth and even what is life and its natural development.
The Earth is warming but physical evidence from around the world tells us that human-emitted carbon dioxide has played only a minor role in it. Instead, the mild warming seems to be part of a natural 1,500-year climate cycle (plus or minus 500 years) that goes back at least one million years.
It's coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so. It's not just climate change; it's sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde. Either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world is doing it for us right now.
As a natural process, of the same character as the development of a tree from its seed, or of a fowl from its egg, evolution excludes creation and all other kinds of supernatural intervention.
Meditation simplifies our outer life and energizes our inner life. Meditation gives us a natural and spontaneous life, a life that becomes so natural and spontaneous that we cannot breathe without being conscious of our own divinity.
Writers are outsiders. Even when we seem like insiders, we're outsiders. We have to be. Our noses pressed to the glass, we notice everything. We mull and interpret. We store away clues, details that may be useful to us later.
What visual information does is it creates priorities. You cannot know with certainty what lies behind something else. There are very few transparent materials in the natural world or the built environment. And so we deal with things superficially, and we deal with what's in front of us, not what's behind our head that we can't see, or to the left or the right. Visualists are often linear and timeline-oriented, whereas the natural condition and the natural way of problem-solving throughout evolution is to be multitasking.
Making a film transforms your relationship to the world. And there's some sort of natural authority that builds up along the way.
Spirituality is a natural part of ourselves, as natural as emotions, but we've got all the language wrong and made this divide between secularism and spirituality, whereas instead it's about being human.
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