Quotes About Adaptation

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. He took a machine designed to get people drunk and turned it into an engine for mass communication.

Evolutionary biologists have a word for this kind of borrowing, first proposed in an influential 1971 essay by Stephen Jay Gould and Elisabeth Vrba: exaptation. An organism develops a trait optimized for a specific use, but then the trait gets hijacked for a completely different function.

Good ideas are not conjured out of thin air; they are built out of a collection of existing parts, the composition of which expands (and, occasionally, contracts) over time. Some of those parts are conceptual: ways of solving problems, or new definitions of what constitutes a problem in the first place. Some of them are, literally, mechanical parts.

whether cities or bodies—find productive uses for the waste they create.

All of us live inside our own private versions of the adjacent possible. In our work lives, in our creative pursuits, in the organizations that employ us, in the communities we inhabit—in all these different environments, we are surrounded by potential new configurations, new ways of breaking out of our standard routines.

La cuestión es inventarse formas de explorar los límites posibles de lo que te rodea. Esto puede ser tan sencillo como cambiar el entorno físico en el trabajo, o cultivar un tipo específico de red social, o mantener ciertos hábitos en la forma de buscar y archivar la información.

Up to now, the philosophers of emergence have struggled to interpret the world. But they are now starting to change it.

The simplest way to answer it is this: innovative environments are better at helping their inhabitants explore the adjacent possible, because they expose a wide and diverse sample of spare parts—mechanical or conceptual—and they encourage novel ways of recombining those parts.

good ideas are more likely to emerge in environments that contain a certain amount of noise and error.

las ideas son como un trabajo de bricolaje: se construyen a partir de restos. Tomamos las que hemos heredado, o nos hemos encontrado por casualidad, y las reorganizamos dándoles nueva forma.

The Web is not simply an ecosystem; it is a specific type of ecosystem. It started as a desert, and it has been steadily transforming into a coral reef.

When Guier, Weiffenbach, and McClure were designing their system to help American submarines launch Polaris missiles against the Soviet Union, it never occurred to them that someday someone would use their platform to rave about a bowl of potato and leek soup to nearby strangers. Stacked platforms are like that: you think you're fighting the Cold War, and it turns out you're actually helping people figure out where to have lunch.

In the contemporary rendition, it's not that the slave technology grows stronger than us and learns to disobey our commands—it's that we deteriorate to the level of the machines. Smart technology makes us dumber.

Amazingly, life went on largely undisturbed as Chesbrough's team raised the city's buildings. One British visitor observed a 750-ton hotel being lifted, and described the surreal experience in a letter: "The people were in [the hotel] all the time coming and going, eating and sleeping—the whole business of the hotel proceeding without interruption

Sooner or later, there's always a Jaws: a mental hurdle we can't clear, a decision too dangerous to attack head on. In those situations, sideways is forward.

Abraham Maslow once famously said,22 "When all you've got is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." What he meant was, when it comes to problem-solving, we tend to get locked into using familiar tools in expected ways.

The typical imperative from biology is not Thou shalt... , but If ... then ... else.

Evolutionarily speaking, there is seldom any mystery in why we seek the goals we seek — why, for example, people would rather make love with an attractive partner than get a slap on the belly with a wet fish.

Unlike features of a landscape like trees and mountains, people have feet. They move to places where opportunities are best, and they soon invite their friends and relatives to join them.

A...reason we are so-so scientists is that our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not.

as we become familiar with something, we think about it more in terms of the use we put it to and less in terms of what it looks like and what it is made of.

The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese

It looks as if the offspring have eyes so that they can see well (bad, teleological, backward causation), but that's an illusion. The offspring have eyes because their parents' eyes did see well (good, ordinary, forward causation).

As has been said about science, sometimes society advances funeral by funeral.47