Quotes About Adaptation

The first railways were far more expensive than the existing canals and far less reliable. Only gradually and with time does the new invention bring down its own costs or raise its efficacy to the point where it can match the old.

Only towards the edge of its range, on an isolated island, or in a remote valley or on a lonely hill top, does natural selection occasionally cause part of a species to morph into something different

Exchange is to technology as sex is to evolution.

There are few clearings in an elm forest and few vacancies on an oyster bed. Each vacancy will attract many thousands of applicants in the form of new seeds or larvae. Therefore, it does not matter that your young are good enough to survive. What matters is whether they are the very best. Sex gives variety, so sex makes a few of your offspring exceptional and a few abysmal, whereas asex makes them all average.

In the world of the Red Queen, any evolutionary progress will be relative as long as your foe is animate and depends heavily on you or suffers heavily if you thrive, like the seals and the bears. Thus the Red Queen will be especially hard at work among predators and their prey, parasites and their hosts, and males and females of the same species. Every creature on earth is in a Red Queen chess tournament with its parasites (or hosts), its predators (or prey), and, above all, with its mate.

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. Success only makes one species a more tempting target for a rival species.

Red Queen theories hold that the world is competitive to the death. It does keep changing. But did we not just hear that species are static for many generations and do not change? Yes. The point about the Red Queen is that she runs but stays in the same place. The world keeps coming back to where it started; there is change but not progress.

Sex, according to the Red Queen theory, has nothing to do with adapting to the inanimate world—becoming bigger or better camouflaged or more tolerant of cold or better at flying—but is all about combating the enemy that fights back.

Evolutionary tortoises nonetheless do more genetic mixing than evolutionary hares. Austin Burt's discovery of a correlation between generation length and amount of recombination is evidence of the Red Queen at work. The longer your generation time, the more genetic mixing you need to combat your parasites.

What is it about human beings that enables them to keep changing their lives in this tumultuous way?

Sexual relations are driven not by what is good, in evolutionary terms, for men or for women, but for their chromosomes. The ability to seduce a woman was good for Y chromosomes in the past; the ability to resist seduction by a man was good for X chromosomes in the past.

Different versions of genes rise and fall in popularity driven often by the rise and fall of diseases. There is a regrettable human tendency to exaggerate stability, to believe in equilibrium.

The common analogy for what Williams was describing is a lottery. Breeding asexually is like having lots of lottery tickets all with the same number. To stand a chance of winning the lottery, you need lots of different tickets. Therefore, sex is useful to the individual rather than the species when the offspring are likely to face changed or unusual conditions.

Indeed, their bodies are designed with planned obsolescence called ageing that causes them to decay after they reach breeding age – or, in the case of squid or Pacific salmon, to die at once. None of this makes any sense unless you view the body as a vehicle for the genes, as a tool used by genes in their competition to perpetuate themselves. The body's survival is secondary to the goal of

Letting good evolve, while doing bad, has been the dominant theme of history. That is why the news is full of only bad things being done, but we find when they are over that great good has happened unheralded. Good things are gradual; bad things are sudden. Above all, good things evolve.

Again and again, we have told ourselves that there is a top–down description of the world, and a top–down prescription by which we should live.

There is no permanent ideal of disease resistance, merely the shifting sands of impermanent obsolescence.

Exchange is to technology as sex is to evolution. It stimulates novelty

Man with all his noble qualities still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.

The free thinking of one age is the common sense of the next.

Scientists now tell us that evolution has been supplanted on this planet by culture. Human culture moves at so rapid a pace that it has far outrun and outstripped the natural processes of change and adaptation. This

This house has endured three of my Dad's four wives, and so over the last few decades it's been a home-size mood ring, changing to the styles and temperaments of its female inhabitants.

Maybe that's just what moving on is, not getting over, but skipping over.

Die Wahrheit richtet sich nicht nach uns, sondern wir müssen uns nach ihr richten.