Garrett Hardin
Whenever a species is subdivided by an environmental barrier, the isolated populations can be expected to become genetically different from each other in the course of time, for the simple reason that no two different regions are ever exactly alike, and each will therefore select for a slightly different norm. Nature and Man's Fate, 1959.
Garrett Hardin: professor emeritus of human ecology at the University of California. Well known for his 1968 essay, "The Tragedy of the Commons." He is also the author of Biology: Its Human Implications, 2nd ed.; Exploring New Ethics for Survival: The Voyage of the Spaceship Beagel, and Filters Against Folly.
The theory of evolution was a half century overdue when Darwin revealed his argument in 1858-59, whereas the theory of heredity, unveiled seven years later, was almost half a century before its time. Ibid.
Two of the greatest intellectual achievements of the nineteenth century were the discovery of the invisible: in physics, the discovery of atoms; in biology, of genes. Ibid.
He who is to see what other men have not seen must, in a real sense, become alienated from the crowd. Ibid.
"Every man of genius," Havelock Ellis said, " is a stranger and a pilgrim on the earth, unlike other men, seeing everything as it were at a different angle." Ibid.
Mutation creates novelty, sex preserves it, and even augments it. Ibid.
Coloration is generally adaptive; but, as Mark Twain said, "the truth can be exaggerated." Ibid.
Out of luxuriant waste, winnowed by selection, come designs more beautiful and in greater variety than ever man could plan. Ibid.
Metaphorically, each rich nation amounts to a lifeboat full of comparatively rich people. The poor of the world are in other, much more crowded lifeboats. Continuously . . . the poor fall out of their lifeboats and swim for a while in the water outside, hoping to be admitted to a rich lifeboat, or in some other way to benefit from the "goodies" on board. What should the passengers on a rich lifeboat do? This is the central problem of "the ethics of a lifeboat." "Living on a Lifeboat," BioScience 24, No. 10, 1974.
It is surprising how many hard-headed business people live in a world of illusion created by deceptive words. The financial world habitually speaks of yearly "production" of oil. But the unvarnished truth is this: we human beings have never produced so much as a single barrel of petroleum. Only nature produces oil - and at a very slow rate. Living Within Limits:Ecology, Economics, and Population Taboos. 1993.
Our contemporary anthropocentric bias is rooted in most surviving religions' view of our place in nature. Ibid.
The belief that only humans were made in God's image fostered a certainty that people are different from all other creatures over which we have dominion. Ibid.
Logic would have it that if we fail to bring about a benign transition to zero population growth by conscious human intervention, nature may, of its own accord, bring about a malignant transition by increasing the death rate to meet the birth rate, Ibid.
Our world itself is in the dilemma of the lifeboat; it can only hold so many before it sinks. Ibid.
The myth of the limitless world is but one of the many myths that have grown up in the protective shadow of the insufficiently examined idea of progress. We are schooled to be naively hopeful of perpetual motion machines but stubbornly resistant to desperately needed social and political changes. Ibid.