Stephen Baxter

Bex shrugged. “You think anybody’s going to listen to a bunch of scientists? No offense. But nobody has so far.”

— Stephen Baxter

The rodents’ vast litters incidentally offered up much raw material to the blind sculptors of natural selection; their evolutionary rate was ferocious.

— Stephen Baxter

With his eland meat Brow was able to reinforce his political position among the men—and buy access to the women, which was ultimately the only purpose of his endless battle for dominance.

— Stephen Baxter

There were other ways for primates to live, other kinds of societies that could be imagined. But once the pattern had been set, it was all but impossible to break.

— Stephen Baxter

Relentless Pleistocene selection was shaping everything that would make up humanity. Even love was a by-product of evolution. Love, and the pain of loss.

— Stephen Baxter

If you were capable of thinking of an object from more than one point of view, you could imagine it doing all sorts of things. For Mother, consciousness was becoming more than just a tool for lying.

— Stephen Baxter

The emergent humans were still animals, still bound by natural law. No innovation in the way they lived would have taken root if it had not given them an adaptive advantage in the endless struggle to survive. An ability to believe in things that weren’t true was a powerful tool.

— Stephen Baxter

In this marginal land accurate information was at a premium; to know the land was to prosper, not to know it meant starvation, and experts were a lot more valuable than bosses.

— Stephen Baxter

Her story was a creation myth, a legend already more than twenty thousand years old. Such tales—which said that Jahna’s people were the pinnacle of creation, that theirs was the only right way, and that all others were less than human—taught the people to care passionately about themselves, their kin, and a few treasured ideals.But to the exclusion of all other humans, let alone such non-people as the Old Man’s kind.

— Stephen Baxter

It (i. e., agriculture) was the most profound revolution in hominid living since Homo erectus had left the forest and committed themselves to the savannah. Compared to this phase shift, the advances of the future—even genetic engineering—were details. There would never be so significant a change again, not until humans themselves disappeared from the planet.

— Stephen Baxter

But even if it is true, even if we are governed by the legacy of an animal past, then it is up to us to behave as if it were not so.

— Stephen Baxter

What makes you think anybody with power will listen to a bunch of scientists? They never have before.

— Stephen Baxter

As the natural systems of the planet broke down, humans would discover conclusively that they were still, after all, just animals in an ecosystem; and as it died back, so did they.

— Stephen Baxter

“You aren’t doing much for morale, Sidewise.”Sidewise shot back, “And what about my morale? It does me no damn good to ignore what’s blindingly obvious all around us.”

— Stephen Baxter

For the genes it made sense, of course. Otherwise it would not have happened.

— Stephen Baxter

Life had always been chancy. And now life had found ways of surviving the ultimate extinction event. In new oceans and on strange lands, evolution had begun again.But it had nothing to do with mankind.

— Stephen Baxter

Anyhow, that’s our story. And I think, in my glimpses of the great encompassing mechanism that has shaped us all, I’ve seen a little of the numinous. That’s enough of God for me.

— Stephen Baxter

Ussher’s intense and obsessive project seems very odd to the eyes of a modern scientist. After all he had deduced the age of the Earth without looking at a scrap of physical evidence—not a single rock.

— Stephen Baxter

Francis Bacon, who died in the seventeenth century, argued strongly that philosophy and theology should be kept separate, and that we should concentrate our studies on the local problems and the interconnections between material and efficient causes. Final-cause analysis was just a distraction: ‘Inquiry into final causes is sterile, and, like a virgin consecrated to God, produces nothing.’

— Stephen Baxter

Buffon’s work created a great furore, of course. The theologians at the Sorbonne condemned him, and Buffon dutifully retracted. But he wasn’t sincere: ‘It is better to be humble than hanged.’

— Stephen Baxter

‘He set no great value on money, or, perhaps, to speak properly, he set on it no more than its true value.’

— Stephen Baxter

In his reliance on evidence, preferably obtained at first hand, Hutton was showing the way to the geological methods of the future.

— Stephen Baxter

Despite his friendship with Adam Smith, he believed in government intervention in agriculture, as it was too important to be left to market forces and chance: ‘The husbandman maintains the nation in all its ease, its affluence and its splendour,’ he wrote. But farmers too had a responsibility for the public good. Rotation of crops, ensuring equal acreages of different crops at any given time, would help keep prices stable.

— Stephen Baxter

Hutton became very critical of a system where appointments depended not on merit but on the support of those in power. Of one possible opening for Watt he wrote, ‘I think it only needs to have a man properly bestir himself but that is what few political people do unless to serve themselves.’

— Stephen Baxter

His overriding lesson for thinkers like Hutton was that scientists, even those occupied by an apparently ‘concrete’ discipline like geology, need to be careful not just about what they claim to know but also about how they claim to know it. Human reason is a fragile thing and prone to be overthrown by suggestibility.

— Stephen Baxter

‘In matters of science, curiosity gratified begets not indolence, but new desires.’

— Stephen Baxter

The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time; and while we listened with earnestness and admiration to the philosopher who was now unfolding to us the order and series of these wonderful events, we became sensible how much farther reason may sometimes go than imagination can venture to follow.

— Stephen Baxter

Humans and their petty doings come and go, but the geology endures.

— Stephen Baxter

The past is a distraction, a source of envy, enmity, bitterness. Only the present matters, for only in the present can we shape the future.

— Stephen Baxter