Jonathan Weiner quotes

The rapid accumulation of change is not always progress, and forward motion is not always an advance. (Jonathan Weiner)
What we don't understand on either front is that the more pressure we put on our pests, the more we cause them to evolve around the pressure. The pressure is evolutionary pressure; what we fail to understand is evolution itself. View quote
Jonathan Weiner
Geneticists will tell you that. Evolution is always happening. What they mean is that the genes of this generation are not precisely what they were the preceding generation. Nor will they be precisely the same in the next. And evolution is that change. View quote
Jonathan Weiner
It's almost as if each instant is our last and first. We are always dying, and always reborn. And that is living. View quote
Jonathan Weiner
As an instrument of planetary home repair, it is hard to imagine anything as safe as a tree. View quote
Jonathan Weiner
All times seem special to those who live in them. View quote
Jonathan Weiner
Whether or not we choose to watch, evolution is shaping us all. View quote
Jonathan Weiner
We do not lift a finger without three kinds of information: the information we are getting from our senses at that moment; the information we have gotten from our senses in the past; and the information our ancestors have acquired since life began on Earth-that is, the information that is represented by genes themselves. Evolution is learning. Species store learning in chromosomes the way individuals store learning in their brains and societies store learning in books. View quote
Jonathan Weiner
For all species, including our own, the true figure of life is a perching bird, a passerine, alert and nervous in every part, ready to dart off in an instant. Life is always poised for flight. From a distance it looks still, silhouetted against the bright sky or the dark ground; but up close it is flitting this way and that, as if displaying to the world at every moment its perpetual readiness to take off in any of a thousand directions. View quote
Jonathan Weiner
We are doing what the dinosaurs did before us, only faster. We bring strangers together to make strange bedfellows, and we remake the beds they lie in, all at once. View quote
Jonathan Weiner
Why are there so many kinds of animals? Adaptive radiations like Darwin's finches are the essence of the answer. (Jonathan Weiner)
Taken together, these new studies suggest the Darwin did not know the strength of his own theory. He vastly underestimated the power of natural selection. Its action is neither rare nor slow. It leads to evolution daily and hourly, all around us, and we can watch. View quote
Jonathan Weiner
Evolution discloses a meaning in death, although the meaning is like some of the berries that Darwin tasted in the Galapagos, "acid & Austere.” There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. Even Drought bears fruit. Even death is a seed. View quote
Jonathan Weiner
One test of a true clock is its ability to keep time through a wide range of temperatures. A clock that speeds up in hot weather and slows down in cold weather is not a clock, although it may make a good thermometer. View quote
Jonathan Weiner
All three spoke in the kind of down-home, common-as-flies style that is the lingua franca of great scientists, conveying a contempt for pretension, a contempt for cant, a delight in common sense, combined with uncommon curiosity about what is really there. View quote
Jonathan Weiner
Ethicists are a mixed lot,” he says, "generally not worrying about their own problems, just somebody else's problems. View quote
Jonathan Weiner
People who don't believe in relativity don't understand relativity. People who don't believe in evolution don't understand evolution. And it's the same with genetics. And I think some people are just reluctant to let their imaginations run. My feeling is that molecular biologists are going to move into psychology and take over the field. I think that's the way psychology is going to be rejuvenated. View quote
Jonathan Weiner