Jonathan Weiner citations (11 citations)

“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.”

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Jonathan Weiner

Source: The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (1994), Chapter 7, Twenty-Five Thousand Darwins

“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.”

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Jonathan Weiner

Source: The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (1994), Chapter 5, A Special Providence

“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.”

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Jonathan Weiner

Source: The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (1994), Chapter 17, The Stranger's Power

“The rapid accumulation of change is not always progress, and forward motion is not always an advance.”

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Jonathan Weiner

Source: The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (1994), Chapter 20, The Metaphysical Crossbeak (p. 289)

“All times seem special to those who live in them.”

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Jonathan Weiner

Source: The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (1994), Chapter 19, A Partner in the Process (p. 276)

“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.”

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Jonathan Weiner

Source: The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (1994), Chapter 18, The Resistance Movement (p. 265)

“Why are there so many kinds of animals? Adaptive radiations like Darwin’s finches are the essence of the answer.”

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Jonathan Weiner

Source: The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (1994), Chapter 14, New Beings (p. 207)

“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.”

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Jonathan Weiner

Source: The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (1994), Chapter 9, Creation by Variation (p. 126)

“Evolution discloses a meaning in death, although the meaning is like some of the berries that Darwin tasted in the Galapagos, “acid & Austere.””

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Jonathan Weiner

There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. Even Drought bears fruit. Even death is a seed.

Chapter 5, A Special Providence (p. 82)
The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (1994)

“Whether or not we choose to watch, evolution is shaping us all.”

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Jonathan Weiner

Source: The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (1994), Chapter 1, Daphne Major (p. 16)

“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.”

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Jonathan Weiner

Source: The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (1994), Chapter 1, Daphne Major (p. 9)

Jonathan Weiner citations

Jonathan Weiner: Citations en anglais