Quotes About Adaptation

Three brothers living in China want to immigrate to the United States. The brothers are named Bu, Chu, and Fu. So they decide to change their names to seem more American. Bu changed his name to Buck. Chu changed his name to Chuck. And Fu got sent back to China.

Q: What's the biggest problem working in a paperless office? A: Needing to shit.

kills billions. While the remaining humans are struggling to adapt and survive, they notice that some among them have... changed. Rachel Wheeler finds herself alone in the city, where violent survivors known as "Zapheads" roam the streets, killing and destroying. Her only hope is to reach the mountains, where her grandfather, a legendary survivalist, established a compound in preparation for Doomsday.

The revolution has to be customised

Software is easy to make, except when you want it to do something new. And then, of course, there is a corollary: The only software that's worth making is software that does something new.

Romeo and Juliet, the dyslexic version.

Dr. W. believes, as Freud did, that anxiety could be an adaptation meant to shield the psyche from some other source of sadness or pain. I ask him why, if that's the case, the anxiety often feels much more intense than the sadness.

Today, evolutionary psychologists say Watson misinterpreted his Little Albert experiment: the real reason Albert developed such a profound phobia of rats was not because behavioral conditioning is so intrinsically potent but because the human brain has a natural—and evolutionarily adaptive—predisposition to fear small furry things on the basis of the diseases they carry. (I explore this at greater length in chapter 9.)

It was an old soul in a new shell.

Reason is a makeshift thing, at best. We have used it but a scant half-million years; our instincts reach back to the days when we crawled in primeval ooze. Trust instinct.

Evolution of form is very much a matter of teaching very old genes new tricks!

As delightful as the Just So explanations are of how spots, stripes, humps and horns came to be, biology can now tell us stories about butterflies, zebras and leopards that I contend are every bit as enchanting as Kipling's fairy tales. What's more, they offer some simple, elegant truths that deepen our understanding of all animal forms, including ourselves.

Darwin's great advantage over Paley and other thinkers of his generation was his grasp of the immensity of time. His

Historically, nature has been very good at surprising us.

As I've said previously as home secretary, dealing with immigration isn't just a single issue and a single measure and a single step that you take. You've got to keep working at that over time.

Survival in any meaningful sense is the key issue of our time

I always go through different phases of how I write and record. It takes me a long time to kind of conceptualize what feels right.

Dispose of everything that was lost. There's no time to dream about something that won't come back. I must look forward. Forward.

I learned a long time ago that place matters to me, on many levels, and maybe more than it should, but it is generally counter-productive for me to resist it.

Progress needs the brakeman, but the brakeman should not spend all his time putting on the brakes.

I had done a sitcom and a movie and hosted the Emmys, and all of a sudden, I lost everything. As someone put it at the time, I was suddenly like a Ferrari in neutral.

They that reverence to much old times are but a scorn to the new.

From time to time the continent shifts, and everything that isn't fastened down slides into Southern California.

We're not good at propping up old carcasses. We want to be on top of what's vital at any particular time, and not just hold onto something because it has a name.