Quotes About Adaptation

Of the billions and billions of species of living thing that have existed since the dawn of time, most—99.99 percent—are no longer around. Life on Earth, you see, is not only brief but dismayingly tenuous. It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.

When simple plants colonized the land and the first creatures crawled gasping from the sea, the Appalachians were there to greet them.

two billion years bacterial organisms were the only forms of life. They lived, they reproduced, they swarmed, but they didn't show any particular inclination to move on to another, more challenging level of existence.

For the first 99.99999 per cent of our history as organisms, we were in the same ancestral line as chimpanzees.

For almost four billion years life had dawdled along without any detectable ambitions in the direction of complexity, and then suddenly, in the space of just five or ten million years, it had created all the basic body designs still in use today.

In Australia and the Americas," says Tim Flannery, "the animals probably didn't know enough to run away.

One reason life took so long to grow complex was that the world had to wait until the simpler organisms had oxygenated the atmosphere sufficiently

Bipedalism is a demanding and risky strategy.

The nineteenth century was already a chilly time. For two hundred years Europe and North America in particular had experienced a Little Ice Age, as it has become known, which permitted all kinds of wintry events—frost fairs on the Thames, ice-skating races along Dutch canals—that are mostly impossible now.

Homo erectus was the first to hunt, the first to use fire, the first to fashion complex tools, the first to leave evidence of campsites, the first to look after the weak and frail.

It occurred to me that Australians are so surrounded with danger that they have evolved an entirely new vocabulary to deal with it.

Sadly, although the source of much enjoyment, Ginger the pig progressed from hunting and killing chickens to lambs and, after a stab at my mother's ankles, was banished to the freezer before she developed a taste for small children.

the slight evolutionary change that pushed man's larynx deeper into his throat, and thus made choking a possibility, also brought with it the possibility of sophisticated, well-articulated speech.

You are the product of three billion years of evolutionary tweaks.

That is the most extraordinary fact about Britain. It wants to be a garden. Flowers bloom in the unlikeliest places–on railway sidings and waste grounds where there is nothing beneath them but rubble and grit. You even see clumps of flowery life growing on the sides of abandoned warehouses and old viaducts. If all the humans in the UK vanished tomorrow, Britain would still be in flower.

At last, some fourteen hundred years after the Romans withdrew, taking their hot baths, padded sofas, and central heating with them, the British were rediscovering the novel condition of being congenially situated.

but I had reached the point where aches and blisters were so central a feature of my existence that I ceased to notice them.

Some varieties of Smokies salamander haven't even evolved lungs. (They breathe through their skin.) Most salamanders are tiny, only an inch or two long, but the rare and startlingly ugly hellbender salamander can attain lengths of over two feet.

or unusually low.

Our ears are built for a quiet world. Evolution did not foresee that one day humans would insert plastic buds in their ears and subject their eardrums to a hundred decibels of melodic roar across a span of millimeters.

At very high altitudes, any exertion becomes difficult and exhausting. Around 40 percent of people experience altitude sickness above thirteen thousand feet, and it is impossible to predict who the victims will be because it is not related to fitness.

Of the billions and billions of species of living things that have existed since the dawn of time, most—99.99 percent, it has been suggested—are no longer around. Life on Earth, you see, is not only brief but dismayingly tenuous. It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.

As Jablonski has written, "The loss of most of our body hair and the gain of the ability to dissipate excess body heat through eccrine sweating helped to make possible the dramatic enlargement of our most temperature-sensitive organ, the brain." That, she says, is how sweat helped to make you brainy.

Edison was good at making things the world didn't yet have but terrible at seeing how it would choose to make use of them.