Quotes About Adaptation

You learn to feel it less, child; or you learn to love other things.

The river flows to the sea, whatever the wind says about it

I had roots, too, but not like that. I could be carefully dug up, and shaken loose, and transplanted into a king's castle, or a tower built of marble—unhappily, perhaps, but I could survive.

consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds

there is no sense your trying to put out sakura blossoms, when you are a bamboo.

Maybe the hardest thing about moving over seas was being in a place where no one but your own family had any memory of you. It was like putting yourself back together in little pieces.

What would it be like to be a turtle inside a shell hit by hailstones?

so many things frowned upon in the early days that shaped us

everyone everywhere suddenly was to 'distance learn,' that awkward, heartless neologism

Adversity will do something too you or for you.......

If life hands you a lemon, don't complain, but instead make lemonade to sell those who are thirsty from complaining.

If the first plan you adopt does not work successfully, replace it with a new plan. If this new plan fails to work, replace it, in turn, with still another, and so on until you find a plan which does work.

The majority of men meet with failure because of their lack of persistence in creating new plans to take the place of those which fail.

We who are in this race for riches, should be encouraged to know that this changed world in which we live is demanding new ideas, new ways of doing things, new leaders, new inventions, new methods of teaching, new methods of marketing, new books, new literature, new features for the radio, new ideas for moving pictures.

To be a good loser is to learn how to win.

Human rhinoviruses may help train our immune systems not to overreact to minor triggers, instead directing their assaults to real threats. Perhaps we should not think of colds as ancient enemies but as wise old tutors.

If a cat lost her tail and then gave birth to tailless cats, the scientific thing to do would be to track down the father and see if he had a tail or not. There was no need to invoke acquired characters to explain why musk ox have thick fur. Natural selection favored individuals that, for whatever reason, had warmer coats that made them less likely to freeze to death.

Since hominin skin doesn't fossilize, we can't say for sure what skin color our ancestors had four million years ago. But if our closest living primate relatives—gorillas and chimpanzees—are any guide, they likely had light skin.

When he bred them, he would discover variations among their offspring.

Careful imitation could also explain why hand axes managed to stay so similar to each other for over a million years. If Homo erectus simply looked over old hand axes to guess how to make them, they would have accidentally introduced little variations to their craft. Over a few thousand years, those mismatches would have caused the hand ax to drift far away from its original shape.

We use words like sister and aunt as if they describe rigid laws of biology. But despite our genetic essentialism, these laws are really only rules of thumb. Under the right conditions, they can be readily broken.

If you stop and think through what it means to grow, the process is astonishing. Each part of the body has to change its shape and size to match every other part. There's no central blueprint for the construction of an adult human. Each cell has to decide for itself, using nothing more than chemical signals and its own network of genes, RNA molecules, and proteins.

In the years after he was forced out of Vineland, Goddard drifted away from the eugenics movement. Rather than figuring out how to keep the feebleminded from having children, Goddard spent his time trying to find ways to help children, no matter their condition. "As for myself," Goddard once said, "I think I have gone over to the enemy.

Traveling across Australia, Asia, and Africa, he searched for people with little contact with the West who he could examine. Porteus found that the so-called Bushmen of the Kalahari scored a mental age of seven. Yet his subjects were navigating their way through Porteus's printed mazes in the middle of a vast desert that they could navigate without a map, finding all the food and shelter they required.