Quotes About Adaptation

Domesticated animals (including humans) are more childlike, sociable, and gentle than their wild ancestors.

After just thirty generations the foxes had become so tame that they could be kept as pets.

he simply picked the cages that produced the most eggs in each generation. Then he bred all of the hens in those cages to produce the next generation. Within just three generations, aggression levels plummeted. By the sixth generation, the death rate fell from the horrific baseline of 67 percent to a mere 8 percent. Total eggs produced per hen jumped from 91 to 237, mostly because the hens started living longer, but also because they laid more eggs

you don't really have to be good at everything. Life offers so many chances to use one tool instead of another, ond often you can use a strength to get around a weakness.

genetic evolution greatly accelerated during the last 50,000 years. The rate at which genes changed in response to selection pressures began rising around 40,000 years ago, and the curve got steeper and steeper after 20,000 years ago.

If genetic evolution was able to fine-tune our bones, teeth, skin, and metabolism in just a few thousand years as our diets and climates changed, how could genetic evolution not have tinkered with our brains and behaviors as our social environments underwent the most radical transformation in primate history?

our brains, bodies, and behavior show many of the same signs of domestication that are found in our domestic animals: smaller teeth, smaller body, reduced aggression, and greater playfulness, carried on even into adulthood.

Emerson and Darwin each found in nature a portal between the realm of the profane and the realm of the sacred. Even if the hive switch was originally a group-related adaptation, it can be flipped when you're alone by feelings of awe in nature, as mystics and ascetics have known for millennia.

Goals are in a near-constant state of revision, especially the shorter-term goals, because as you come up against the reality of learning something, you have to adapt to adjust to that reality.

making the best of a bad situation is the heart of creativity.

But you couldn't live forever in crisis mode. Eventually it stopped feeling like a crisis.

At first, when a child meets something that scares him, the fear grows, like a wave. But when he goes into the water and swims - gets used to the water - the wave grows small. If we pull the child away when the wave is high, he never sees that, never learns how to swim and remains afraid. If he gets a chance to feel strong, in control, that's called coping. When he copes, he feels better.

Nice concept. -What is? -Retreating. Getting away from the grind. -Oh, you never do. You just change gears.

Your first time?" the Hauptman gently asked. I nodded. "You'll get used to it," he went on, "but maybe never completely." He

I've managed to stay alive out here in the Ruin because I'm a realist. I allow the truth to be the truth, no matter how much I might want it to be something else.

T)he world is always changing. Always. We can't give the next generation a set of guarantees. Best we can do is help them be smart enough and tough enough to deal with whatever comes. You know as well as I do that we're not going to be there forever for them.

the world is always changing. Always. We can't give the next generation a set of guarantees. Best we can do is help them be smart enough and tough enough to deal with whatever comes. You know as well as I do that we're not going to be there forever for them.

roughly translated 2 from the Hmong language of the Laotian mountain people, which observes: "If I know it then I can hunt it; if I do not know it then it can hunt me.

I was a monster before the Fall and I'm a monster now. A different kind of monster, sure, but then again it's a different world.

This is our condition. We do not solve problems. We replace them with other problems.

I can't divorce Kent and his art from what causes pain in Kent's life. This is true in the lives of many individuals labeled ADHD. Their greatest gifts are interwoven with their greatest weaknesses. This might be true for all of us. But we can make something beautiful from this paradox. Our lives can sometimes be a sort of poem—part genetics, part individual adaptation.

When you quilting up a life, you sometimes got to start with any piece you can get your hands on.

From the moment that the first plow blade bit into the crust, the homesteaders began to destroy the foundations of their new life, and in a very few years the crust was gone--used up, scattered, blown away by the dry summer winds.

When I asked her how she would have fared had she remained out there on her own, fishing for information online and trying to figure out where to begin, she replied that she might eventually have made a successful transition, but the process would have been difficult and demoralizing.