Quotes About Adaptation

from conditions that are calculated to have been warmer and wetter than today's 13,000 years ago,70 to conditions that were colder and drier than those at the last glacial maximum just a few hundred years later.

Anyway, I'm not one for labels: they change every couple of years like the hemlines on women's skirts.

She used to think that he was so stocky, and bull-like, but now he felt like a laundry bag filled with old coat hangers.

These characters were like twelve-bar blues or other chord progressions. Given the basic parameters of Batman, different creators could play very different music.

Pop, like Chronos the Titan, always eats its darlings.

human or animal

They were burying the past, or as much of it as they could part with.

So many of us find ourselves saying, "but he was so great!" Yes, and the people who got on the Titanic thought they were going on vacation. Things changed and it's important to remember that they did.

into another identity. And I

Deer were damn good swimmers, though not many people knew it.

I know things are changing, but they don't change everywhere at the same speed. Down here time moves on the different clock. Down here it's still forty years ago, in some ways.

Might-have and mud are fine places to wallow

Brother Horse spread five fingers in the wind. 'Thus the tree grows,' he quoted, 'and each new branch, as a new tree. Nothing is unchanging, least of all the ways of people.

Newton's Third Law To move forward, we have to leave something behind.

Russia's most prominent military scientist noted that Desert Storm showed that terms like "front lines" and "flanks," and the idea that winning a war means occupying enemy territory, were no longer relevant.

I've never felt like this before. I'm a snake shedding my skin. A pupa hatching into a butterfly.

What happened to the days when everyone was on the same page because what we saw and read was handed to us?

There is a quasi-scientific fable that if you can get a frog to sit quietly in a saucepan of cold water, and if you then raise the temperature of the water very slowly and smoothly so that there is no moment marked to be the moment at which the frog should jump, he will never jump. He will get boiled. Is the human species changing its own environment with slowly increasing pollution and rotting its mind with slowly deteriorating religion and education in such a saucepan?

Denisovans, Neanderthals, more. Trial balloons of biology.

Rachel thought about the many bottlenecks humanity had passed through—genetic squeezes of drought, predation, hardship—all forcing selection upward.

Killeen had potted a Snout that carried edible foods for its organic parts. They had both stuffed themselves with the greasy goo.

All our bright minds," Feynman said sardonically, "and we can't figure how to stop the enemy from dumping dirt on us." Freeman said with delicate precision, "We are hothouse flowers, really. Not made for the blunt edge of war." Nods

his most recent sobriquet

What we call cowardice is often just another name for being taken by surprise, and courage is seldom any better than simply being well prepared.