Quotes About Adaptation

Let's imagine I happen to be writing some sort of truth here. By the time you read this, I might have changed my mind. Ten years from now, I would likely put it differently. By then I may regret that I wrote this. And regardless of how I feel then, I'll bet that if you reread my book twenty years from now, you'll have changed, so the book will have changed, too. So much for changeless truth.

I'm for whatever gets you through the night.

Some people have twenty years of experience, while others have one year of experience twenty times.

Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.

One thing is sure. We have to do something. We have to do the best we know how at the moment... If it doesn't turn out right, we can modify it as we go along.

It takes a long time to bring the past up to the present.

A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned how to walk forward.

It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.

A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward.

You sometimes find something good in the lunatic fringe. In fact, we have got as part of our social and economic government today a whole lot of things which in my boyhood were considered lunatic fringe, and yet they are now part of everyday life.

There are very few things we can know beforehand. We will try and if we find we are wrong, we will have to change.

It is true that I can trip over anything and nothing – a speck of dust, a patch of sunlight, an idea. I move through life like a person with one eye, through a landscape that looks flat, but is really tricked out with hidden depths and shallows. It didn't use to be so, but no matter. I navigate the world well enough in my own way.

Emotions help us navigate a complex world that we don't fully comprehend. They are our body's way of ensuring that we do what is best for us.

One can train dolphins to jump synchronously because they do so in the wild, and one can teach horses to run together at the same pace because wild horses do the same.

Emotions evolved, in short, for their capacity to induce adaptive reactions to danger, competition, mating opportunities, and so on. Emotions are action-prone. Our species shares many emotions with the other primates because we rely on approximately the same behavioral repertoire.

I felt like a toilet frog during the last three decades of the preceding century. (38)

Dolphins] produce signature whistles, which are high-pitched sounds with a modulation that is unique for each individual [...]. Females keep the same melody for the rest of their lives, whereas males adjust theirs to those of their closest buddies, so that the calls within a male alliance sound alike. (p. 262)

Human reflection is chronically overrated, though, and we now suspect that our own reaction to food poisoning is in fact similar to that of rats. Garcia's findings forced comparative psychology to admit that evolution pushes cognition around, adapting it to the organism's needs.

Animals should be given a chance to express their natural behavior.

There are lots of wonderful cognitive adaptations out there that we don't have or need. This is why ranking cognition on a single dimension is a pointless exercise. Cognitive evolution is marked by many peaks of specialization. The ecology of each species is key.

en route to such trees and get up before dawn, something they normally hate to do.

Animals learn what they need to learn and have specialized ways of sifting through the massive information around them. They actively seek, collect, and store information. (p. 270)

A species's cognition is generally as good as what it needs for its survival.

There is no single form of cognition, and there is no point in ranking cognitions from simple to complex. A species's cognition is generally as good as what it needs for its survival. (p. 200)