Quotes About Adaptation

Learning to read music in Braille and play by ear helped me develop a damn good memory.

Evolution is the fundamental idea in all of life science - in all of biology.

When you're green you're growing, and when you're ripe you start to rot.

Are you green and growing or ripe and rotting?

I had to twist Harold Freund's arm repeatedly to get him to build a bakery just to service our California stores. Freund now has the largest, most automated bun plant in the world. It produces eight thousand buns an hour for McDonald's. It also has a plant in St. Petersburg serving all of Florida, and another serving all of Hawaii. Fred

As long as you're green you're growing, as soon as you're ripe you start to rot

One of the things I did differently was to make my milkshakes with a soft product drawn from a tank, instead of hand-dipping ice cream. This changed the layout and gave us more space. One major problem in adapting the California-style building to the Midwestern climate was ventilation. I brought in architectual consultants one after the other in an attempt to solve the problem of exhausting the stale air and replacing it with fresh cool or heated air.

It needs only to be good enough, which in the case of our species meant a level of intelligence sufficient to enable us to outwit the competitors in our ecological niche

The need to congregate workers in offices will gradually diminish.

Ever since we picked up a stick to reach a higher branch, we have used our tools to extend our reach, both physically and mentally.

The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get old ones out.

No communication technology has ever disappeared, but instead becomes increasingly less important as the technological horizon widens.

the R&D department can't get them to work but because the timing is wrong. Inventing is a lot like surfing: you have to anticipate and catch the wave at just the right moment.

I realized that most inventions fail not because the R&D department can't get them to work but because the timing is wrong. Inventing is a lot like surfing: you have to anticipate and catch the wave at just the right moment.

Two billion years ago, our ancestors were microbes; a half-billion years ago, fish; a hundred million years ago, something like mice; ten million years ago, arboreal apes; and a million years ago, proto-humans puzzling out the taming of fire. Our evolutionary lineage is marked by mastery of change. In our time, the pace is quickening. —CARL SAGAN

To this day, I remain convinced of this basic philosophy: no matter what quandaries we face—business problems, health issues, relationship difficulties, as well as the great scientific, social, and cultural challenges of our time—there is an idea that can enable us to prevail.

Evolution works through indirection: each stage or epoch uses the information-processing methods of the previous epoch to create the next.

Innovations created by evolution encourage and enable faster evolution. In the case of the evolution of life-forms, the most notable early example is DNA, which provides a recorded and protected transcription of life's design from which to launch further experiments

inventar se parece mucho a hacer surfing: tienes que anticiparte y coger la ola justo en el momento adecuado).

Moreover, the detailed arrangement of connections and synapses in a given region is a direct product of how extensively that region is used. As brain scanning has attained sufficiently high resolution to detect dendritic-spine growth and the formation of new synapses, we can see our brain grow and adapt to literally follow our thoughts. This gives new shades of meaning to Descartes' dictum "I think therefore I am.

we invent tools—to compensate for our shortcomings.

The human mind likes a strange idea as little as the body likes a strange protein and resists it with a similar energy. —W. I. BEVERIDGE

A century ago 30 percent of the U.S. workforce was employed on farms, with another 30 percent in factories. Both of these figures are now under 3 percent.2 Many of today's job categories, ranging from flight controller to Web designer, simply didn't exist a century ago.

The most important thing is this: To be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become. —CHARLES DUBOIS