
“What humans can't engineer, evolution can.”
Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995)
On evolution vs. "intelligent design", interviewed by Jon Stewart, The Daily Show http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=18090&title=kurt-vonnegut/ (13 September 2005)
Various interviews
“What humans can't engineer, evolution can.”
Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995)
“Why didn't evolution make a giraffe good at carpentry so it could build a ladder?”
Xfm 11 June 2005
On Biology
As quoted in Joe Satriani : Riff By Riff (1994) by Rich Maloof.
You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, But You Can't Make Him Think (2009)
Videodrome commentary track
Context: Technology isn’t really effective, it doesn’t really expose its true meaning, I feel, until it has been incorporated into the human body. And most of it does, in some way or another. Electronics. People wear glasses. They wear hearing aids that are really little computers. They wear pacemakers. They have their intestines modified. It’s really quite incredible what we’ve been able to do to the human body and really take it some place that evolution on its own could not take it. Technology has really taken over evolution. We’ve seized control of evolution ourselves without really quite being conscious of it. It’s no longer the environment that affects change in the human body, it’s our minds, it’s our concepts, our technology that are doing that.
Charles Eames in a 1952 speech to a national assembly of the AIA; As cited in: Ray Eames http://eamesdesigns.com/library-entry/ray-eames/ at eamesdesigns.com, Accessed April 8, 2014; Charles Eames talks about Ray Eames
“She glanced at him. “What gods do you respect?”
“None.”
“And why not?”
“I help myself,” he said.”
Source: Wild Seed (1980), Chapter 1 (p. 20)