Human Evolution Quotes

“Perhaps the most chaotic of Divisions Ke Hui Feng 第一 Ψ
visited was Recycling. First, it was mammoth, so big most of
her tour was spent aboard a drone. Thousands of Dazhong
used the 401 thoroughfares from both east and west, the 427
from the south and the 400 from the north to bring their loads of
recyclables from the MASS to the enormous MEG Recycling Centre.
The roadways might be in ruins outside the MEG boundaries, jagged
fragments of pavement between cavernous potholes and trails made by
traders, but within the MEG the wide lanes had been cleared and
covered with recycled rubber. They were smooth and divided, one lane
in—one lane out, between hundred-metre high foamstone walls on
either side. No one from the MASS would ever get into the MEG illegally;
at least, that was how it seemed.
Only those with proper credentials could enter the massive gates:
MASS traders, or trading companies, who specialized as middlemen
between the gatherers and the Recycling Centre. Not far outside the
gates the MASS traders had rebuilt ancient warehouses in which they
received goods, stored, and sorted them, then brought them, usually
by land freighters, down the ingress roads to meet MEG approved Di
sān overseers and, of course, decontaminated Dazhong who further
sorted the goods.”
― Brian Van Norman, Against the Machine: Evolution

“The morgue was the name the human workers gave to this room in the facility. They were careful not to utter it in front of the androids, for fear of offending them.”
― A.R. Merrydew, The Girl with the Porcelain Lips

“You realize, of course, the Omegans nearly lost this Earth. They
had everything yet let it disintegrate through their rampant carelessness.
Two hundred years past they possessed the rudimentary beginnings
of the NET to bring them together. They called it the Internet.
Yet they treated it like a toy, tribalized themselves, and thus nearly lost
the planet.
“Nationalist wars, self serving ideologies, competing religions . . .
more significant, though not to the Omegans, was climate change
itself, which mattered more than any petty dogma, but they ignored
it until too late. It has ultimately determined our lives, managed now
by the CORPORATE, using the only possible tools to survive. There
were billions of Humans then. There is now but a fraction of that:
some 300 million we know in the MEGS and, of course, the uncounted
MASSes.”
― Brian Van Norman, Against the Machine: Evolution

“Rule # 1: keep the crowd’s interest.”
― Brian Van Norman, Against the Machine: Evolution

“What’s your business, Sir?”
“Jus’ call me Gord. Labour relations.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m a broker, kid. Middlemen need workers an’ wagons t’ bring
their recyclings south. I’m the one who supplies ‘em.”
“Where are they now?”
“Over there, you can just see the wagons under the tubes. The
men sleep under ‘em.”
“They’re shackled.”
“Yup.”
“Prisoners?”
“Nope. Indentured labour.”
― Brian Van Norman, Against the Machine: Evolution

“Why is your species so dissatisfied?”
“How so?”
“Humans are individuals, quite social in nature. You strive to
become more than yourselves using Silicon reconstructions in your
bodies and filaments in your brains connecting you, unnaturally, to
the NET.”
“Our bodies are mortal. We employ silicon and alloys to extend
our bodies’ existence.”
“You appear to be attempting the same strategy with your brains’
architectures.”
“By using the NET? Is that what you mean?”
“You will never accomplish this. You must know it.”
“Surely you can understand that as we are now, we have what we
consider a limited lifespan, and, it seems, so does this planet. When
the inevitable happens, we will not be able to travel any substantial
distance in space. We cannot escape our dying planet. Humanity will
cease to exist if we fail. We face our ultimate existential crisis as a species.
Our most basic instinct is the survival of our species, so you see
we must try. It is in our nature. It is evolution or elimination.”
― Brian Van Norman, Against the Machine: Evolution

“The concept and subsequent development of these JEN2 successors to the old machines, was a story in its own right. It was also one marred with frustration, hidden agendas and ultimately punctuated with a sad human tragedy.”
― A.R. Merrydew, The Girl with the Porcelain Lips

“I see you made it Jack,’ he started to say, noticing a silver sphere roll across the loading bay floor. It stopped just short of his shoes before it exploded.”
― A.R. Merrydew, The Girl with the Porcelain Lips

“She stood panting as adrenalin fired up her muscles. Flipping open the safety catches on both of her laser pistols, she set them for maximum delivery. Anything or anyone on the receiving end of these weapons would never survive, even as atoms.”
― A.R. Merrydew, The Girl with the Porcelain Lips

“When one contemplates the streak of insanity running through human history, it appears highly probable that homo sapiens is a biological freak, the result of some remarkable mistake in the evolutionary process. The ancient doctrine of original sin, variants of which occur independently in the mythologies of diverse cultures, could be a reflection of man's awareness of his own inadequacy, of the intuitive hunch that somewhere along the line of his ascent something has gone wrong.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine

“Meditation is interacting with truth inside and scientific research is interacting with truth outside. Both are required for human evolution, emancipation and empowerment.”
― Amit Ray, Compassionate Artificial Intelligence

“Individuals are temporary meeting points on the crisscrossing routes that genes take through history.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution

“Comprehension is not the source of competence or the active ingredient in competence; comprehension is composed of competences.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds

“By our very nature, we humans are linear thinkers. We evolved to estimate a distance from the predator or to the prey, and advanced mathematics is only a recent evolutionary addition. This is why it’s so difficult even for a modern man to grasp the power of exponentials. 40 steps in linear progression is just 40 steps away; 40 steps in exponential progression is a cool trillion (with a T) – it will take you 3 times from Earth to the Sun and back to Earth.”
― Alex M. Vikoulov, The Intelligence Supernova: Essays on Cybernetic Transhumanism, The Simulation Singularity & The Syntellect Emergence

“Research from Baton and Konner in 1985 and Cordain et al. in 2000 estimated that about 65 per cent of the diets of pre-agricultural Palaeolithic humans may still have come from plants – far more than only your recommended five fruit and veg a day, I would say. Interestingly, anatomically modern humans are believed to have more copies of the starch-digesting genes than the Neanderthals and the Denisovans (another extinct species or subspecies of archaic human that ranged across Asia during the Lower and Middle palaeolithic), suggesting that the ability to digest starch has been a continuous driver through human evolution as much as walking upright, having big brains and articulate speech - perhaps being a baker may be the oldest profession after all.”
― Jordi Casamitjana, Ethical Vegan: A Personal and Political Journey to Change the World

“Our minds have been built by selfish genes, but they have been built to be social, trustworthy and cooperative. That is the paradox this book has tried to explain. Human beings have social instincts. They come into the world equipped with predispositions to learn how to cooperate, to discriminate the trustworthy from the treacherous, to commit themselves to be trustworthy, to earn good reputations, to exchange goods and information, and to divide labour.”
― Matt Ridley , The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation

“If you ask me, our planet and our entire lives are a [virtual] construct of our own minds and the mind at large. If we were to decode the COVID-19 message coming from the transcendent realm, I would approximate it as: ‘The next phase of human evolution is clearly in the cards now: Consuming synthetic meat and being open to the connectivity explosion with immersive virtual worlds not for escapism but for expansion of the human creative imagination should become a conscientious choice for billions. The ‘Cradle Age’ is almost over.”
― Alex M. Vikoulov, NOOGENESIS: Computational Biology

“When Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit the Earth in April 1961, he carried generations of hopes and dreams into space with him. A growing number of thinkers now believe the 'Overview Effect' heralds nothing less than the next 'giant leap' of human evolution. As breathtaking space-down views of our world seep into our collective consciousness, people are waking up to the 'Spaceship Earth' analogy that depicts our planet as a natural vessel that must be steered responsibly by its crew.”
― Alex M. Vikoulov, The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution

“As shortcuts to spiritual and transcendent experiences, psychedelics played an important role in human evolution and galvanized pre-historic ritualistic cultures. In modern times, banning psychedelic drugs has proven to be counterproductive. Just as banning sexual activity does not stop sexual desire, outlawing psychedelic drugs does nothing to suppress the innate human urge for transcendental experiences. Besides, prohibition rarely works as we saw with alcohol or marijuana. Despite their classification and the legal hurdles around working with Schedule I substances in the U.S., psychedelics have undergone something of a renaissance among researchers, and for good reason.”
― Alex M. Vikoulov, The Intelligence Supernova: Essays on Cybernetic Transhumanism, The Simulation Singularity & The Syntellect Emergence

“Why are humans so different to all other animals? Like the language we use to frame it, that can seem too obvious to ask – but the answer is rooted in words, and turns out to have been hiding in plain sight.”
― Simon Prentis, SPEECH! How Language Made Us Human

“…either we behave like intelligent, rational animals, respecting Nature and accelerating as much as possible the process of humanization we are only just beginning, or the quality of human life will deteriorate. Some of us are starting to have doubts about the rationality of human groups. But if we do not act rationally, we will suffer the same fate as some cultures and some stupid species of animals, of whose suffering and path to extinction all that remains are fossils. Species that do not change biologically, ecologically or socially when their habitat changes are bound to perish after a period of indescribable suffering.”
― Héctor Abad Gómez, Teoría Y Práctica De Salud Pública

“If people only read but don't write or vice versa, human evolution will slow down.”
― Sukant Ratnakar, Quantraz

“Perhaps I overestimate the intelligence of our species. Perhaps we are little more than psychopathic apes, driven to fashion clubs and smash out the brains of our closest neighbours.”
― Josh Reynolds, Fabius Bile: The Omnibus

“Human beings are a highly social species with a long evolution that makes us desire both autonomy and connection. We need to grow and express our individuality freely--and at the same time, feel like we have people to rely on to love us and have our backs.”
― Allyson Dinneen, Notes From Your Therapist

“She was lovely and fair to see
And elfin's heart beat fitfully
But lovelier far, and still more fair
The earthly form imprinted there
Naught he saw in heavens above
Was half so dear as his mortal love”
― Joseph Rodman Drake, Collected Works Of Joseph Rodman Drake

“Humans are apes, and the alpha monkeys on the top of the food chain will always dominate the herd. That's why they created religion, to make the job easier.”
― Zzenn Loren

“The concept and subsequent development of these JEN2 successors to the old machines, was a story in its own right. It was also one marred with frustration, hidden agendas and ultimately punctuated with a sad human tragedy.”
― Anthony Merrydew, The Girl with the Porcelain Lips

“     The morgue was the name the human workers gave to this room in the facility. They were careful not to utter it in front of the androids, for fear of offending them.”
― Anthony Merrydew, The Girl with the Porcelain Lips

“   ‘I see you made it Jack,’ he started to say, noticing a silver sphere roll across the loading bay floor. It stopped just short of his shoes before it exploded.”
― Anthony Merrydew, The Girl with the Porcelain Lips

“She stood panting as adrenalin fired up her muscles. Flipping open the safety catches on both of her laser pistols, she set them for maximum delivery. Anything or anyone on the receiving end of these weapons would never survive, even as atoms.”
― Anthony Merrydew, The Girl with the Porcelain Lips