Quotes About Adaptation

First, the behavior should not follow directly from present needs and desires. Second, it should prepare the individual for a future situation in a different context than the current one. The girl needed a spoon not in bed, but at the chocolate pudding party she expected in her dream.11

He prefers to point with a stick and will go out of his way to bring one with him, thus anticipating our test and his self-invented need for a tool. But

Such cases deserve attention since they show that apes do not have to be prompted by experimental conditions concocted by us humans to plan for the future. They do so of their own accord.

Primates are in fact natural conformists. Not only do they imitate, they also like to be imitated.

The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind. —Charles Darwin

Taken by themselves, emotions are pretty useless. Simply being fearful doesn't do an organism any good. But if a fearful state prompts an organism to flee, hide, or counterattack, it may well save its life. Emotions evolve, in short, for their capacity to induce adaptive reactions to danger, competition, mating opportunities, and so on. Emotions are action-prone.

What is the largest land mammal doing with three times as many neurons as our own species?

One can take the ape out of the jungle, but not the jungle out of the ape.

In the same way that humans have a "handy" intelligence, which we share with other primates, elephants may have a "trunky" one. There

Cognitive evolution is marked by many peaks of specialization. The ecology of each species is key. The

All that nature can offer is information and inspiration, not prescription.

We can't return to this preindustrial way of life. We live in societies of a mind-boggling scale and complexity that demand quite a different organization than humans ever enjoyed in their state of nature. Yet, even though we live in cities and are surrounded by cars and computers, we remain essentially the same animals with the same psychological wants and needs.

humans are a strange lot. We have the power to analyze and explore the world around us, yet panic as soon as the evidence threatens to violate our expectations.

Behavior doesn't fossilize. This is why speculations about human prehistory are often based on what we know about other primates. Their behavior indicates the range of behavior our ancestors may have shown.

This is clearly not so. Pigeons, for example, do better than humans at mentally rotating visual images, and some birds have an amazing memory for the location of hidden objects. Clark's nutcrackers store up to 33,000 seeds in caches distributed over many square kilometers and find most of the caches again months later.28As someone who occasionally forgets where he has parked an item as large and significant as his car, I am impressed by these peanut-brained birds.

when the cost of believing a false pattern is real is less than the cost of believing the genuine pattern, natural selection will favor the false pattern.

Ä°lkel ve soyutlanm?? kabileler bize stabil görünürler; çünkü rahat ve müdahale edilmeyen koÅŸullarda deÄŸiÅŸim oldukça yavaÅŸt?r.

Life is what happens to you while you're making other plans.

The brook would lose its song if you removed the rocks

I stopped predicting the future a long time ago.

It's amazing how, over time, a person's perspective can be altered.

He became what his language made him.

What can it mean, 150 years after Darwin, to say that some species or communities are good and some are bad?

Tactics, fitness, stroke ability, adaptability, experience, and sportsmanship are all necessary for winning.