Time & Perspective Quote by William Irwin Thompson

Thompson is smuggling a provocation into what sounds like a calm evolutionary timeline: the decisive break in human history isn’t upright walking or bigger brains, it’s the moment symbols began to outpace biology. “Millions and not billions” is a quiet correction of scale, but it also sets up his real claim: once language arrives, “time” itself accelerates. Not clock-time, but lived historical time - the density of change per generation.

The intent is philosophical more than scientific. He’s pointing to a shift from evolution as slow, genetic adjustment to evolution as cultural feedback loop. Language doesn’t just let humans describe reality; it lets them store it, transmit it, argue with it, and revise it. The subtext is that humanity becomes a self-editing species: ideas mutate faster than bodies, and those ideas reshape environments, which then reshape us. That’s acceleration as a mechanism, not a metaphor.

Context matters: Thompson, writing within late-20th-century systems thinking and cultural history, is interested in “deep time” meeting media and myth. The line anticipates the contemporary panic and fascination around information overload: if language accelerates change, what happens when language is industrialized into print, broadcast, and now networked code? The quote reads less like triumphalism than a warning about tempo. Once you build a world out of symbols, you also build pressures to keep updating it. Progress becomes inseparable from churn, and the human animal has to live inside a history that moves faster than its instincts.