Quotes About Adaptation

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

We need an updated insurance plan against our won basic natures

human beings were creatures of habit, and it was amazing the kind of things they could get used to.

TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN' begum Dil Afroze was a well-known opportunist who believed, quite literally, in changing with the times. When the Movement seemed to be on the up and up, she would set the time on her wristwatch half an hour ahead to Pakistan Standard Time. When the Occupation regained its grip she would reset it to Indian Standard Time. In the Valley the saying went, 'Begum Dil Afroze's watch isn't really a watch, it's a newspaper. Q 1: What is the moral of the story?

Iba por el mundo como un camaleón. Nunca mostraba su verdadero ser, y se las arreglaba para que no se notara. Siempre salía ileso del caos.

Ammu said that human beings were creatures of habit, and it was amazing the kind of things they could get used to. You only had to look around you, Ammu said, to see that the beatings with brass vases were the least of them.

Later became a horrible, menacing, goose-bumpy word.

We have journeyed to a place from which it looks unlikely that we can return, at least not without some kind of serious rupture with the past - social, political, economic and ideological.

Although moral truths are eternal, their actual application is subject to temporal modification.

Modern travel would be totally delightful if only I could learn to enjoy boredom, discomfort, and fatigue.

They had not understood - they'd not known what a hole you faced when you turn around, and the one you'd thought would always be there was gone.

Don't let yourself be. Find something new to try, something to change. Count how often it succeeds and how often it doesn't. Write about it. Ask a patient or a colleague what they think about it. See if you can keep the conversation going.

Steps to become a positive deviant: 1. Ask unscripted questions 2. Don't complain 3. Count something that interests you 4. Write something... Anything 5. Change yourself. Change something

Living is a kind of skill.

And then a new question arises: If independence is what we live for, what do we do when it can no longer be sustained?

The philosophy is that you push the power of decision making out to the periphery and away from the center. You give people the room to adapt, based on their experience and expertise. All you ask is that they talk to one another and take responsibility. That is what works. The

We are a species that evolved to survive starvation, not resist abundance

New technology also creates new occupations and requires new expertise, which further undermines the value of long experience and seasoned judgment.

The body's decline creeps like a vine. Day to day, the changes can be imperceptible. You adapt. Then something happens that finally makes it clear that things are no longer the same.

Human birth...is a solution to an evolutionary problem: how a mammal can walk upright, which requires a small, fixed, bony pelvis, and also possess a large brain, which entails a baby whose head is too big to fit through that small pelvis...in a sense, all human mothers give birth prematurely. Other mammals are born mature enough to walk and seek food within hours; our newborns are small and helpless for months.

by incorporating feedback from each success and each failure to improve their guesswork.

It is not death that the very old tell me they fear. It is what happens short of death—losing their hearing, their memory, their best friends, their way of life. As Felix put it to me, "Old age is a continuous series of losses.

It used to be 'Two hip replacements today—yay!'" he recalled. "Then it became 'Two hip replacements today—ugh.

Culture has tremendous inertia," he said. "That's why it's culture. It works because it lasts. Culture strangles innovation in the crib." To combat the