Quotes About Adaptation

Reality is a powerful selection pressure. A hominid that soothed itself by believing that a lion was a turtle or that eating sand would nourish its body would be outreproduced by its reality-based rivals.

Language is not a protocol legislated by an authority but rather a wiki that pools the contributions of millions of writers and speakers, who ceaselessly bend the language to their needs and who inexorably age, die, and get replaced by their children, who adapt the language in their turn.

The philosophers Liam Clegg and Daniel Dennett have argued that human behavior is inherently unpredictable not just because of random neural noise in the brain but as an adaptation that makes it harder for our rivals to outguess us.

Parker Brothers tried to introduce a German version of Risk, the board game in which players try to dominate a map of the world, the German government tried to censor it. (Eventually the rules were rewritten so that players were "liberating" rather than conquering their opponents' territories.)

Complex organs evolve by small steps for the same reason that a watchmaker does not use a sledgehammer and a surgeon does not use a meat cleaver.

Human vice is proof that biological adaption is, speaking literally, a thing of the past. Our minds are adapted to the small foraging bands in which our family spent ninety-nine percent of its existence, not the topsy-turvy contingencies we have created since the agricultural and industrial revolutions. [...] People do not divine what is adaptive for them or their genes; their genes give them thoughts and feelings that were adaptive in the environment in which the genes were selected.

It's often said that the Stone Age did not end because the world ran out of stones, and that has been true of energy as well.

As the economist Ludwig von Mises put it centuries later, "If the tailor goes to war against the baker, he must henceforth bake his own bread.")

economist Friedrich Hayek observed, "If old truths are to retain their hold on men's minds, they must be restated in the language and concepts of successive generations

If old truths are to retain their hold on men's minds, they must be restated in the language and concepts of successive generations

If the tailor goes to war against the baker, he must henceforth bake his own bread

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. —L. P. Hartley

Things that can't go on forever can go on much longer than you think.

People hold many beliefs that are at odds with their experience but were true in the environment in which we evolved, and they pursue goals that subvert their own well-being but were adaptive in that environment

Los sans del desierto del Kalahari

Si algo no puede continuar indefinidamente, puede continuar mucho más tiempo del que piensas».

people adapt to their circumstances, good or bad, the way their eyes adapt to sun or darkness. From that neutral point, improvement is happiness, loss is misery.

In Beyond Revenge: The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct, the psychologist Michael McCullough shows that we do have this dimmer switch for revenge.

education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at.

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

If you walk away from a sandcastle, it won't be there tomorrow, because as the wind, waves, seagulls, and small children push the grains of sand around, they're more likely to arrange them into one of the vast number of configurations that don't look like a castle than into the tiny few that do.

Evolution left us with another burden: our cognitive, emotional, and moral faculties are adapted to individual survival and reproduction in an archaic environment, not to universal thriving in a modern one.

In all foraging societies, presumably including our ancestors, hunting is overwhelmingly a male activity. Women are cumbered with children which makes hunting inconvenient and men are bigger and more adapted to killing because of they're evolutionary history of killing each other.

the theory of the hedonic treadmill