Mike

“Once intelligent beings achieve technology and the capacity for self-destruction of their species, the selective advantage of intelligence becomes more uncertain.”
― Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence

“a typical chromosomal DNA molecule in a human being is composed of about five billion pairs of nucleotides… But since there are four different kinds of nucleotides, the number of bits of information in DNA is four times the number of nucleotide pairs. Thus if a single chromosome has five billion (5 X 10^9) nucleotides, it contains twenty billion (2 X 10^10) bits of information… We also see that if more than some tens of billions (several times 10^10) of bits of information are necessary for human survival, extragenetic systems will have to provide them: the rate of development of genetic systems is so slow that no source of such additional biological information can be sought in the DNA.”
― Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence

“Evolution is adventitious and not foresighted. Only through the deaths of an immense number of slightly maladapted organisms are we, brains and all, here today.”
― Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence

“...a veces nos preguntamos por qué la felicidad tarda tanto en llegar, por qué no vino antes, pero si nos aparece de repente, como en este caso, cuando ya no la esperábamos, entonces lo más probable es que no sepamos qué hacer con ella, y la cuestión no es tanto elegir entre reír o llorar, es la secreta angustia de pensar que tal vez no consigamos estar a su altura”
― José Saramago, El hombre duplicado