Evolution

"If you look back at the great jumps in the spiral of evolution--from pre-life to life, or single cell to animal, or animal to human--there are recurring patterns. When a species is young, it's rapacious, territorial, and competitive, and then it hits a limit to its own growth. Then, either it learns to negotiate and cooperate with its competitors and unify at a higher level, or it goes extinct. So the set of global conditions, althought they're unprecendented for us, are actually like a fractal of patterns that have occurred in the past. It's natural that an intelligent species would be successful enought to hit the limits of its own growth without knowing it was going to do so. It's natural that through our successes we have over industrialized, over populated, polluted and used up our environment. It may be that the whole predicament is a natural and that this intelligent species, which has finally gained an understanding of the atom, the gene, and the brain, in now getting a signal: evolve or die."

~Barbara Marx Hubbard