Quotes About Adaptation

Innovations usually begin life with an attempt to solve a specific problem, but once they get into circulation, they end up triggering other changes that would have been extremely difficult to predict.

Her research suggests a paradoxical truth about innovation: good ideas are more likely to emerge in environments that contain a certain amount of noise and error.

As Lynn Margulis writes: "All the world's bacteria essentially have access to a single gene pool and hence to the adaptive mechanisms of the entire bacterial kingdom. The speed of recombination over that of mutation is superior: it could take eukaryotic organisms a million years to adjust to a change on a worldwide scale that bacteria can accommodate in a few years.

Over generations, the gene pool of the first farmers became increasingly dominated by individuals who could drink beer on a regular basis. Most of the world's population today is made up of descendants of those early beer drinkers, and we have largely inherited their genetic tolerance for alcohol.

The wealthiest cities of the world will follow Venice's lead and simply try to engineer their way around the problem. The poorest cities will follow New Orleans' lead—at least so far—and just move to other nearby cities. Either way the poplation stays urban.

The second precondition is that the network be plastic, capable of adopting new configurations.

The computer scientist Christopher Langton observed several decades ago that innovative systems have a tendency to gravitate toward the "edge of chaos":

where small niches can flourish.

New ideas need old buildings.

An innovation, or cluster of innovations, in one field ends up triggering changes that seem to belong to a different domain altogether.

In the case of the vacuum tube, it trained our ears to enjoy a sound that would no doubt have made Lee De Forest recoil in horror. Sometimes the way a new technology breaks is almost as interesting as the way it works.

Innovations usually begin life with an attempt to solve a specific problem, but once they get into circulation, they end up triggering other changes that would have been extremely difficult to predict. This is a pattern of change that appears constantly in evolutionary history.

the "hummingbird effect." An innovation, or cluster of innovations, in one field ends up triggering changes that seem to belong to a different domain altogether.

A sustained scenario practice can make leaders comfortable with the ambiguity of an open future," Wack writes. "It can counter hubris, expose assumptions that would otherwise remain implicit, contribute to shared and systemic sense-making, and foster quick adaptation in times of crisis.

One gets the sense that Darwin would have been an avid Fitbit user.)

When nature is in need of new ideas, it strives to connect, not protect.

But it is clear that Gutenberg had no formal experience pressing grapes. His radical breakthrough relied, instead, on the ubiquity of the screw press in Rhineland wine-making culture, and on his ability to reach out beyond his specific field of expertise and concoct new uses for an older technology.

exaptation. An organism develops a trait optimized for a specific use, but then the trait gets hijacked for a completely different function.

Good ideas may not want to be free, but they do want to connect, fuse, recombine.

The towns might have lacked air conditioning and laptops and cable television, but they managed to keep their Toyota 4Runners on the road. So Rosen approached Prestero with an idea: What if you made an incubator out of automobile parts? Three years after Rosen suggested the idea, the Design that Matters team introduced a prototype device called the NeoNurture. From the outside, it looked like a streamlined modern incubator, but its guts were automotive.

Good ideas are like the NeoNurture device. They are, inevitably, constrained by the parts and skills that surround them.

Nature's innovations, too, rely on spare parts. Evolution advances by taking available resources and cobbling them together to create new uses.

that is the unpredictable power of exaptations. Chance favors the connected mind.

The same pattern appears again and again throughout the evolution of life. Indeed, one way to think about the path of evolution is as a continual exploration of the adjacent possible.