Quotes About Adaptation

A corollary of this perspective is that there is no such thing as a perfect market, an equilibrium or an end state.

Good things are gradual; bad things are sudden. Above all, good things evolve.

that the flywheel of history is incremental change through trial and error, with innovation driven by recombination, and that this pertains in far more kinds of things than merely those that have genes. This

Good institutions cannot usually be imposed from above: that way they are oxymorons.

The traditional university will surely be gone in fifty years, swept away by technology.

A species that over many generations repeatedly exposes itself to some experience will eventually find its offspring selected for a genetic predisposition to cope with that experience. Why?

We are perforce in some sense constrained, goaded, or at least affected by the accumulated impact of selective decisions made over thousands of generations.

nature has never found human incomprehension a reason for changing her methods.

It makes more sense to see the body as serving the needs of the genes than vice versa. Bottom–up.

Far more than we like to admit, the world is to a remarkable extent a self-organising, self-changing place.

Let's give a bit less credit to creationists, while we encourage and celebrate the evolution of everything.

If you think being descended from apes is bad for your self esteem, then get used to the idea that you are also descended from viruses.

And by forcing ourselves to learn something, we place ourselves in a selective environment that puts a premium on a future instinctive solution to the problem. Thus, learning gradually gives way to instinct.

Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!

Most species do not change their habits during their few million years on earth or alter their lifestyle much in different parts of their range.

It is not confined to genetic systems, but explains the way that virtually all of human culture changes: from morality to technology, from money to religion.

So plants can withstand almost any loss, and regenerate easily. They are utterly decentralised.

Imagine you are a deer. You have essentially only four things to do during the day: sleep, eat, avoid being eaten and socialise (by which I mean mark a territory, pursue a member of the opposite sex, nurse a fawn, whatever).

We now know that Lamarckism cannot work because bodies are built from cakelike recipes, not architectural blueprints, and it is simply impossible to feed information back into the recipe by changing the cake.

in a sorry world there is no safety to be found in standing still.

And by forcing ourselves to learn something, we place ourselves in a selective environment that puts a premium on a future instinctive solution to the problem.

In effect, since the process of natural selection is one of extracting useful information from the environment and encoding it in the genes, there is a sense in which you can look on the human genome as four billion years' worth of accumulated learning.

If a monkey leaves the troop it is born into, it has no chance to inherit its mother's rank. Therefore, high-ranking females will have young of whatever gender stays at home in order to pass on the high rank to them. Low-ranking females will have young of whatever gender leaves the troop in order not to saddle the young with low rank.

In about ten years, the genes of the AIDS virus change as much as human genes change in 10 million years. For bacteria, thirty minutes can be a lifetime. Human beings, whose generations are an eternal thirty years long, are evolutionary tortoises.