Common Ancestor Quotes

#1. We observe closely related species in sympatry and infer how they evolved from a common ancestor.

Peter R. Grant

#2. The different human peoples did not evolve out of a common ancestor; they were each born out of the womb of their own homeland. We appeared in different parts of the world at the same time. Each group was as much a part of their environment as the other animals and plants of the region.

Eliot Cowan

#3. We split from our common ancestor with the octopus half a billion years ago. And yet, you can make friends with an octopus.

Sy Montgomery

#4. If you share a common ancestor with somebody, you're related to them. It doesn't mean that you're going to invite them to the family reunion, but it means that you share DNA. I think it's fascinating.

Henry Louis Gates

#5. Yes, evolution by descent from a common ancestor is clearly true. If there was any lingering doubt about the evidence from the fossil record, the study of DNA provides the strongest possible proof of our relatedness to all other living things.

Francis Collins

#6. We share a common ancestor with chimps that is not shared by mandrills, we share a common ancestor with mandrills that is not shared by bushbabies, and on and on and on, to the ancestor we share with nematode worms that is not shared with oak trees.

Simon Barnes

#7. Religion and science have a common ancestor - ignorance.

A.C. Grayling

#8. An oak tree and I are made of the same stuff. If you go far enough back, we have a common ancestor. The

Carl Sagan

#9. Searching for alternative life on Earth might seem misconceived, because there is excellent evidence that every kind of life so far studied evolved from a common ancestor that lived billions of years ago. Yet most of the life that exists on Earth has never been properly classified.

Paul Davies

#10. Molecular evidense suggests that our common ancestor with the chimpanzees lived, in Africa, between 5 and 7 million years ago, say half a million generations ago. This is not long by evolutionary standards.

Richard Dawkins

#11. And, you know, the fact is, if you believe in evolution, we all have a common ancestor, and we all have a common ancestry with the plant in the lobby. This is what evolution tells us. And, it's true. It's kind of unbelievable.

Jeff Hawkins

#12. If we go far enough back, any two people on Earth have a common ancestor.

Carl Sagan

#13. A friend of ours has a hobby doing genealogy, and we found out that we were cousins in the ninth degree, that we had a common ancestor on the Mayflower.

Marion Zimmer Bradley

#14. By comparing the human and chimp genomes, we can see the process of evolution clearly in the changes (in DNA) since we diverged from our common ancestor.

Bob Waterston

#15. If a single cell, under appropriate conditions, becomes a man in the space of a few years, there can surely be no difficulty in understanding how, under appropriate conditions, a cell may, in the course of untold millions of years, give origin to the human race.

Herbert Spencer

#16. An irrefutable proof that such single-celled primaeval animals really existed as the direct ancestors of Man, is furnished according to the fundamental law of biogeny by the fact that the human egg is nothing more than a simple cell.

Ernst Haeckel

#17. The moment that you accept life and your life as it is, is the moment that you will start to change your life and this magical life itself.

Rasheed Ogunlaru

#18. When two strangers in a tribal society want to trade, they will often establish trust by appealing to a common god, mythical ancestor or totem animal.

Yuval Noah Harari

#19. I'd say people that really inspired me at first were like, Dustin Hoffman, Jim Carrey ... serious Jim Carrey though.

Logan Lerman

#20. The moment at which two people, approaching from opposite ends of a long passageway, recognize each other and immediately pretend they haven t. This is to avoid the ghastly embarrassment of having to continue recognizing each other the whole length of the corridor.

Douglas Adams

#21. Ganging up on a short-range interest isn't the same thing as killing it.

George Ainslie

#22. Coming Home, a story about a family that contains a beautiful parable about contemporary China.

Anonymous

#23. I don't want to go to Peru."
How do you know? You've never been there."
I've never been to hell either and I'm pretty sure I don't want to go there.

Richard Paul Evans

#24. All of today's DNA, strung through all the cells of the earth, is simply an extension and elaboration of [the] first molecule.

Lewis Thomas

#25. The common ancient ancestor of mulluses and chordates could not possibly have possessed a camera eye, so quite clearly they have evolved independently. The solution has been arrived at by completely different routes.

Simon Conway Morris