Quotes About Adaptation

mutatis mutandis

Some people just need a routine, and refuse to accept the consequences of predictability. In my experience, these people tend to get culled, often sooner, sometimes later. It's a Darwinian world out there.

It's hard for the most primal, powerful regions of the mind to abandon habits that were once crucial to the organism's survival, even when the higher mind recognizes those habits are no longer warranted.

We are studying sensible ways to amend our own constitution in India. And we often joke that perhaps you Americans could lend us yours, because you seem no longer to be using it yourselves.

I was impressed. I had been taking care not to stand out or to otherwise become memorable, and he had spotted me anyway. He was well attuned to his environment, to the patterns that might at some point make the difference between winning and losing. Or living and dying.

My American and Japanese personalities are distinct, and I carry myself differently depending on which language I'm using and which mode I'm in.

I hadn't expected her to follow this line of reasoning. I'm usually good at putting myself in the other person's shoes, anticipating his next move. But she had outplayed me on this one. Time to try to regain some initiative, give myself a second to think.

We all, to some extent, reinvent ourselves. Jeffrey (Archer) has just gone to a bit more trouble.

I had come to the canyon with expectations. I wanted to see snowy egrets flying against the black schist at dusk; I saw blue-winged teal against the green waters at dawn. I had wanted to hear thunder rolling in the thousand-foot depths; I heard the guttural caw of four ravens…what any of us had come to see or do fell away. We found ourselves at each turn with what we had not imagined.

Because mankind can circumvent evolutionary law, it is incumbent upon him, say evolutionary biologists, to develop another law to abide by if he wishes to survive, to not outstrip his food base. He must learn restraint. He must derive some other, wiser way of behaving toward the land.

the skill of staying poised in worrying times. To survive what's headed our way—global climate disruption, a new pandemic, additional authoritarian governments—and to endure, we will have to stretch our imaginations. We will need to trust each other, because today, it's as if every safe place has melted into the sameness of water. We are searching for the boats we forgot to build.

The mistake is to assume that the way it feels at the moment is the way it will feel forever.

This ubiquitous feature of human psychology is a process known as adaptation. Simply put, we get used to things, and then we start to take them for granted.

Even though we don't expect it to happen, such adaptation to pleasure is inevitable, and it may cause more disappointment in a world of many choices than in a world of few.

We could go a long way toward improving the experienced well-being of people in our society if we could find a way to stop the process of adaptation.

Rather it is the result of a complex interaction among many psychological processes that permeate our culture, including rising expectations, awareness of opportunity costs, aversion to trade-offs, adaptation, regret, self-blame, the tendency to engage in social comparisons, and maximizing.

And unlike adaptation, the experience of gratitude is something we can affect directly. Experiencing and expressing gratitude actually get easier with practice. By causing us to focus on how much better our lives are than they could have been, or were before, the disappointment that adaptation brings in its wake can be blunted.

Most good decisions will involve these steps: 1. Figure out your goal or goals. 2. Evaluate the importance of each goal. 3. Array the options. 4. Evaluate how likely each of the options is to meet your goals. 5. Pick the winning option. 6. Later use the consequences of your choice to modify your goals, the importance you assign to them, and the way you evaluate future possibilities.

The ubiquitous feature of human psychology is a process known as adaptation . Simply put, we used get to things and then we start to take them for granted.

In oral societies it is recognized that the telling of a story to a different audience or in a different context or for a different reason calls for a different version of the story. Stories are molded to the time and circumstance in which they are told.

collective memory, is essentially a reconstruction of the past that adapts the image of historical facts to the beliefs and spiritual needs of the present.

The widespread notion that stories never should be changed but should be repeated without alteration every time is an innovation of modern written cultures.

the art of the possible.

each author of the Bible lived in his own time and place—and not in ours.