Colin Tudge

A knowledge of our own history is a significant part of culture and, at present, that knowledge is absurdly curtailed.

Natural selection is not concerned with dignity—only with reproductive success.

The effect of natural selection over time is to change the composition of the gene pool.

Nature’s rules are universal, and nature has no taste.

Every society has cause to know that the beneficence of the Earth cannot be taken for granted.

In particular, to suggest that the creature which is measurably superior in any particular respect is ipso facto morally superior is bad science (since it is not in the brief of science to make such judgments) and also bad moral philosophy (since this is merely a variation on the deeply suspect theme of “might makes right”).

Nature is endlessly inventive, yet endlessly reinvents.

The point is simply to realize that the Earth does indeed behave in extraordinary ways—and incredulity is no defense.

The party really is over....The attitude that has been so appropriate this past 10,000 years, and has allowed the most exploitative-experimental people to rise inexorably if fitfully to the top, has simply ceased to be appropriate. Yet our economies are geared to the exploitative-experimental approach, and so are our political systems. So all of a sudden, or so it seems, our political and economic institutions and philosophies are out of synch with the biological and physical realities of the planet. It might be unrealistic to devise new systems that are radically different, with a radically different motivation; but if we do not do this, then we cannot seriously contemplate long-term survival. Surely it cannot be the case that the only “realistic” course is to head pell-mell for disaster? Is that what the level-headed, sober-suited people are arguing? Our position seems not merely precarious, but ludicrous.

The agricultural systems of the world are not actually designed to feed people....If the prime concern of the human species was to feed people, then we would do things very differently.

We cannot claim to take the environment seriously until we acknowledge that a million years is a proper unit of political time. That is the general lesson of history.

The crucial notion that the world has not always been the way it is now.

In practice, the attempt to relate the evidence on the ground directly to the Noachian Flood was more or less abandoned after the 1820s.

This intricate picture has not been easy to put together. It has required a succession of insights over three centuries, each one demanding a huge leap of imagination, and the Earth scientists, though little recognized, have been among the most imaginative of all. But because the insights did require such imagination, each has met with incredulity. No scientists have been more comprehensively scorned than those who have sought to explain how the world behaves. Time after time, however, the most extraordinary ideas have turned out to be right, and the conservative notions have proved inadequate.

In short, we are innately bad at introspection.