Quotes About Adaptation

Cancer is the price we pay for evolution.

85 percent of the 30,000 Anglo-Saxon words died out under the influence of the Danes and Normans. That means that only about 4,500 Old English words survived—about 1 percent of the total number of words in the Oxford English Dictionary. And yet those surviving words are among the most fundamental words in English: man, wife, child, brother, sister, live, fight, love, drink, sleep, eat, house, and so on.

some birds and marine mammals are able to switch off one half of their brain at a time, so that one half remains alert while the other is snoozing.

And then you might learn, as we did from a local, that the reason hundreds of starlings in flight will twist and turn in unison is because the ones on the outside are constantly trying to get to the inside where they feel safer. Some

Almost no one ever notices it, but our thumbs are on sideways. The thumbnail faces away from the rest of the fingers.

Just passing through a door, being inside, surrounded by walls and a ceiling, was novel.

canvas tarpaulin, and a piece of old carpet. I'm not sure that they didn't lay an old wardrobe on top of that, just to

Slowly it dawned on me what's going on here. The Natural History Museum can't afford to be a museum anymore, so the directors are stealthily turning it into a food court.

You are totally at the mercy of nature in this country (Australia), mate.

I have been told more than once that one of the more trying things about learning to live with the Germans after the war was having to watch them return with their wives and girlfriends to show off the places they had helped to ruin.

I'm out of rabbits and hats to pull them out of.

Follow the trend lines, not the headlines.

The Glock is lighter by a good measure than the Beretta I was trained on, with a better grip, and I've heard it's accurate, but weapons are like cars—you know they have standard stuff like lights and an ignition and windshield wipers, but it still takes a few seconds to figure them out when they're unfamiliar. So I burn precious moments getting a feel for it before I'm ready to point and shoot—

That's why ears have cartilage, to keep them from flapping.

In this business, by the time you realize you are in trouble, it's too late to save yourself. Unless your running scared all the time, you're gone.

During the last ice age, the average temperature was just 6 degrees Celsius lower than it is today. During the age of the dinosaurs, when the average temperature was perhaps 4 degrees Celsius higher than today, there were crocodiles living above the Arctic Circle.

In climate terms, a change of just a few degrees is a big deal. During the last ice age, the average temperature was just 6 degrees Celsius lower than it is today. During the age of the dinosaurs, when the average temperature was perhaps 4 degrees Celsius higher than today, there were crocodiles living above the Arctic Circle. It's

What's remarkable to me is not how much emissions went down because of the pandemic, but how little.

And consider how long it took for oil to become a big part of our energy supply. We started producing it commercially in the 1860s. Half a century later, it represented just 10 percent of the world's energy supply. It took 30 years more to reach 25 percent.

This chart shows how much various energy sources grew over the course of 60 years, starting from the time they were introduced. Between 1840 and 1900, coal went from 5 percent of the world's energy supply to nearly 50 percent. But in the 60 years from 1930 to 1990, natural gas reached just 20 percent. In short, energy transitions take a long time.

La vida no es justa, acostúmbrate a ello

Cities need to change the way they grow. Urban areas are home to more than half the people on earth—a proportion that will rise in the years ahead—and they're responsible for more than three-quarters of the world's economy. As they expand, many of the world's fast-growing cities end up building over floodplains, forests, and wetlands that could absorb rising waters during a storm or hold reservoirs of water during a drought.

Extra heat won't be good for the animals we eat and get milk from; it will make them less productive and more prone to dying young, which in turn will make meat, eggs, and dairy more expensive.

a 2-degree rise wouldn't simply be 33 percent worse than 1.5; it could be 100 percent worse. Twice as many people would have trouble getting clean water. Corn production in the tropics would go down twice as much.