Quotes About Adaptation

Los Angeles has always been a boom town, chronically unable to . . . integrate its new population.

When I was a child the comic case for baseball being the hardest game argued, 'Despite using a round bat and a round ball, you're told to hit it square.

The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.' That's from Emerson

In nature violence is pure and purposeful, one species against another in an act of survival!

Guess I'll have to come back another day and try again, Roy thought. That's what a real Florida boy would do.

The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.' That's from Emerson, by the way.

The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions

Shad pointed to the book on the cocktail table. 'The guy in this story, he turns into a motherfucking centipede. Wakes up one morning and bingo! He's a bug. Sounds asinine, but it sure makes you think. People change overnight, they're not careful.

He just wanted to blend in quietly and not be noticed, like a bug on a riverbank.

Beings who've succeeded on earth for millennia don't seek, and should not require, our approval. They belong here as do we. We do ourselves no favors by asking whether their existence is worth our while. We are hardly in a position to judge, hurtling and lurching along as we are with no goal, no plan except: bigger, faster, more.

UmysÅ' czÅ'owieka i sÅ'onia ksztaÅ'towaÅ' siÄ™, gdy poruszaliÅ›my siÄ™ po takim samym krajobrazie, radzÄ…c sobie z tymi samymi wyzwaniami, mierzÄ…c dÅ'ugo?? dni w oparciu o wysoko?? tego samego sÅ'oÅ"ca, a nocami nasÅ'uchujÄ…c odgÅ'osów tych samych niebezpieczeÅ"stw. JesteÅ›my zsynchronizowani, bo zasadniczo mamy podobne pochodzenie.

Caltech brain researcher John Allman says that through agriculture and other ways of reducing daily hazards of existence, humans domesticated themselves. We now depend on others to provide food and our shelter. We're a lot like poodles in that regard.

What but the wolf's tooth whittled so fine The fleet limbs of the antelope? —Robinson Jeffers

Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.

And after we returned to the savannahs and abandoned the trees, did we long for those great graceful leaps and ecstatic moments of weightlessness in the shafts of sunlight of the forest roof?

The secrets of evolution, are time and death. There's an unbroken thread that stretches from those first cells to us.

Those are some of the things that molecules do, given four billion years of evolution

Man is a transitional animal. He is not the climax of creation.

We are rendering many species extinct; we may even succeed in destroying ourselves. But this is nothing new for the Earth. Humans would then be just the latest in a long sequence of upstart species that arrive on-stage, make some alterations in the scenery, kill off some of the cast, and then themselves exit stage-left forever. New players appear in the next act. The Earth abides. It has seen all this before.

almost every species that has ever existed is extinct; extinction is the rule, survival is the exception.

the future belongs to those societies that treat new ideas as delicate, fragile and immensely valuable pathways to the future.

Part of the resistance to Darwin and Wallace derives from our difficulty in imagining the passage of the millennia, much less the aeons. What does seventy million years mean to beings who live only one-millionth as long? We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.

Significant change might require those who are now high in the hierarchy to move downward many steps. This seems to them undesirable and is resisted.

So far as I know, childbirth is generally painful in only one of the millions of species on Earth: human beings. This must be a consequence of the recent and continuing increase in cranial volume... Childbirth is painful because the evolution of the human skull has been spectacularly fast and recent.