Quotes About Adaptation

Rules? More rules? Really? Isn't life complicated enough, restricting enough, without abstract rules that don't take our unique, individual situations into account?

RULE 1 STAND UP STRAIGHT WITH YOUR SHOULDERS BACK LOBSTERS— AND TERRITORY

Much of what we consider healthy mental function is the result of our ability to use the reactions of others to keep our complex selves functional. We outsource the problem of our sanity.

Every bit of learning is a little death. Every bit of new information challenges a previous conception, forcing it to dissolve into chaos before it can be reborn as something better. Sometimes such deaths virtually destroy us. In such cases, we might never recover or, if we do, we change a lot.

And given that our brains are plastic, and all develop differently based on our life experiences, why even expect that a few rules might be helpful to us all?

Living things are always to be found in places they can master, surrounded by things and situations that make them vulnerable.

Women's proclivity to say no, more than any other force, has shaped our evolution into the creative, industrious, upright, large-brained (competitive, aggressive, domineering) creatures that we are.

Imagine that you are very good at some, middling at others, and terrible at the remainder. Perhaps that's how it should be. You might object: I should be winning at everything! But winning at everything might only mean that you're not doing anything new or difficult. You might be winning but you're not growing, and growing might be the most important form of winning. Should victory in the present always take precedence over trajectory across time?

A functional social institution—a hierarchy devoted to producing something of value, beyond the mere insurance of its own survival—can utilize the conservative types to carefully implement processes of tried-and-true value, and the creative, liberal types to determine how what is old and out of date might be replaced by something new and more valuable.

That's where we are simultaneously stable enough, exploring enough, transforming enough, repairing enough, and cooperating enough.

People create their worlds with the tools they have directly at hand. Faulty tools produce faulty results. Repeated use of the same faulty tools produces the same faulty results. It is in this manner that those who fail to learn from the past doom themselves to repeat it.

Rules should not be multiplied beyond necessity. (…) Limit the rules. Then, figure out what to do when one of them gets broken.

The "fit" in "fitness" is therefore the matching of organismal attribute to environmental demand.

you have to run as fast as you can just to stay in the same place." No one standing still can triumph, no matter how well constituted.

Si la Madre Naturaleza no se mostrara tan dedicada a acabar con nosotros, nos resultaría mucho más fácil vivir en total armonía con lo que dispone.

People differ in intelligence, which is in large part the ability to learn and transform.

dominance hierarchies have been an essentially permanent feature of the environment to which all complex life has adapted.

El cambio que altera lo actualmente predecible y ordenado también implica potencial para avanzar hacia un futuro más prometedor. Lo inesperado es, en sí mismo, información, una información necesaria para la expansión constante de la competencia adaptativa. Esa información viene envuelta en peligro y promesa.

Did what I want happen? No. Then my aim or my methods were wrong. I still have something to learn." That is the voice of authenticity.

Cualquiera que haya sentido una dolorosa transformación tras sufrir un duro revés amoroso o profesional puede sentirse hasta cierto punto identificado con ese crustáceo que una vez lo dominaba todo.

the circuits that engage you — for example when you're having an argument about something fundamental with someone that you love. So you're trying to structure the world around you, jointly, to create a habitable space that you both can exist within. You're using the same circuits — the abstracted version — that our archaic ancestors would have used when they went out into the unknown itself to encounter beasts and predators and geographical unknowns.

You remember the old joke: insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results.

Circumstances change, and so can you. Positive feedback loops, adding effect to effect, can spiral counterproductively in a negative direction, but can also work to get you ahead.

Sometimes you have to change the way you understand everything to properly understand a single something.