Quotes About Adaptation

There can be no doubt that the existing Fauna and Flora is but the last term of a long series of equally numerous contemporary species, which have succeeded one another, by the slow and gradual substitution of species for species, in the vast interval of time which has elapsed between the deposition of the earliest fossiliferous strata and the present day.

According to Teleology, each organism is like a rifle bullet fired straight at a mark; according to Darwin, organisms are like grapeshot of which one hits something and the rest fall wide.

The dead should not rule the living.

all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

As new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times.

Half a loaf is better than no bread

I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions...but I know also that laws and constitutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.....

In the environment, every victory is temporary, every defeat permanent.

It might well be that getting used to things up here was simply a matter of getting used to not getting used to them—but

mas a gente se habitua ao fato de não se habituar.

getting used to being up here consisted in getting used to not getting used

The past was only tolerable if one felt above it, instead of having to stare stupidly at it aware of one's present impotence.

Living is not thinking. Thought is formed and guided by objective reality outside us. Living is the constant adjustment of thought to life and life to thought in such a way that we are always growing, always experiencing new things in the old and old things in the new. Thus life is always new.

Living is the constant adjustment of thought to life and life to thought in such a way that we are always growing, always experiencing new things in the old and old things in the new. Thus life is always new.

Let us, therefore, learn to pass from one imperfect activity to another without worrying too much about what we are missing. It is true that we make many mistakes. But the biggest of them all is to be surprised at them: as if we had some hope of never making any.

Oedipa sat on the earth, ass getting cold, wondering whether, as Driblette had suggested that night from the shower, some version of herself hadn't vanished with him. Perhaps her mind would go on flexing psychic muscles that no longer existed; would be betrayed and mocked by a phantom self as the amputee is by a phantom limb. Someday she might replace whatever of her had gone away by some prosthetic device, a dress of a certain color, a phrase in a letter, another lover.

To those of us who survived [...], it also means that we have learned to stand outside our history and watch it, without feeling too much. A little schizoid.

Soon the mercilessly even drumbeat fill'd the Day, replacing the accustom'd rhythms of country People with the controlling Pulse of military Clock-Time, announcing that all events would now occur at the army's Pleasure, upon the army's schedule.

Social Darwinists of the day were forever on about the joys of bloody teeth and claws, but they were curiously uncelebratory of speed and deception, poison and surprise.

Perhaps her mind would go on flexing psychic muscles that no longer existed; would be betrayed and mocked by a phantom self as the amputee is by a phantom limb. Someday she might replace whatever of her had gone away by some prosthetic device, a dress of a certain color, a phrase in a letter, another lover.

Failure is part of the natural cycle of business. Companies are born, companies die, capitalism moves forward. Fortunemagazine{115}

The people I feel sorry for are those who insist on continuing to do what they have always done but want the results to be different from what they have always been.

Darwinian adaptation to environment applies not only to nature but also to society. Just as you don't find eagles living in the ocean or fish living on mountain tops, so you don't find leftists concentrated where their ideas have to stand the test of performance.

Could we change our attitude, we should not only see life differently, but life itself would come to be different.