Quotes About Adaptation

We relate to the virus, in some ways, as we relate to Trump. We yearn desperately to return to a time of imagined normalcy, before Trump and before the coronavirus. But we can heal only by looking forward—perhaps to a life that will be slower, more environmentally responsible and less materially comfortable, but also more clearly rooted in mutual aid and the understanding of our fundamental equality and interdependence.

President Barack Obama's observation that the prime minister had "one foot in the old ways of doing business and one foot in the new," Putin said, "We don't spread our legs.

fortochka. It is a tiny window cut inside a larger pane. Even when windows have been sealed for the long winter, the fortochka can remain in use, being opened regularly to allow air to circulate. The Soviet university, as it turned out, had its fortochkas, and the way to learn was to hunt for them and then to stick your whole face in them and breathe the fresh air as though one's lungs could be filled up with reserve supplies.

Sometimes I discover I have changed my mind because I have forgotten what I used to think.

When I became Jason, an English computer expert, I returned to a calmer and far more comfortable lifestyle. The cover verged on perfection; the one tiny defect was my complete ignorance of the English language and computers.

Exhausted, he realized that he couldn't fight such power. The only thing he could do was go with the flow.

I know it's a mess and it's half-taped together and it's old and busted– but it's mine. And you gotta make that work, right? You gotta make your own stuff work out.

You see, doing one thing differently is very often the same as doing everything differently.

If you were stranded on an island, what 3 things would you bring with you?

It is my proposition that the human race has become a collective problem-solving machine and it solves problems by changing its ways. It

The struggle for existence never gets easier. However well a species may adapt to its environment, it can never relax, because its competitors and its enemies are also adapting to their niches. Survival is a zero-sum game.

I want to do for every aspect of the human world a little bit of what Charles Darwin did for biology, and get you to see past the illusion of design, to see the emergent, unplanned, inexorable and beautiful process of change that lies underneath.

The big firms that survive will do so by turning themselves into bottom-up evolvers.

Then there appeared upon the earth a new kind of hominid, which refused to play by the rules. Without any changes in its body, and without any succession of species, it just kept changing its habits. For the first time its technology changed faster than its anatomy. This was an evolutionary novelty, and you are it. When

Our habits and our institutions, from language to cities, are constantly changing, and the mechanism of change turns out to be surprisingly Darwinian: it is gradual, undirected, mutational, inexorable, combinatorial, selective and in some vague sense progressive.

Because bodies do not replicate themselves but are grown, whereas genes do replicate themselves, it inevitably follows that the body is merely an evolutionary vehicle for the gene, rather than vice versa.

Life adapted to the laws of physics, not vice versa.

almost all biologists agreed that no creature could ever evolve the ability to help its species at the expense of itself. Only when the two interests coincided would it act selflessly.

The most important fact about extreme weather is that the number of deaths caused by floods, droughts and storms has dropped by 93 per cent since the 1920s, despite a trebling of the world population: not because the weather has grown less wild, but because the world has grown rich enough to enable us to protect ourselves better.

the complexity of society does not imply a planner.

They may direct the construction of the body and brain in the womb, but then they set about dismantling and rebuilding what they have made almost at once—in response to experience.

Education, done properly, is an emergent, evolutionary phenomenon.

Technology will find its inventors, rather than vice versa.

the Stone Age did not come to an end for lack of stone.