Quotes About Adaptation

Curtis was just a chip off old Franky only she had much better legs. Poor Franky didn't have any legs but he had a wonderful brain. In some other country he would have made

When you didn't know how to do anything that's what you became—a shipping clerk, receiving clerk, stock boy.

Vaya sorpresa que te vas a llevar, amigo... ¡cuando descubras que nosotros los viejos retrógrados queremos también un mundo mejor! ¡sólo que no somos partidarios de QUEMAR la casa para librarnos de las termitas!

Dinosauria, we born

Siempre es bueno saber que puedes vivir sin una persona sin la que pensabas que nunca serías capaz de vivir.

Of course, there were a lot of good people sleeping in the streets. They weren't fools, they just didn't fit into the needed machinery of the moment. And those needs kept altering. It was a grim set-up and if you found yourself sleeping in your own bed at night, that alone was a precious victory over the forces.

My spoon was bent so that if I wanted to eat I had to pick the spoon up with my right hand. If I picked it up with my left hand, the spoon bent away from my mouth. I wanted to pick the spoon up with my left hand.

Last time I saw you, you had nothing. Now you've got a woman and a radio.

then came the manual typewriter. then the electric typer. and now this. it's as if I have been reborn.

For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum.

you didn't adjust, you simply got more and more tired

He had been an army officer in Germany and had come to America when he heard that the streets were paved with gold. They weren't, so he became the head of a construction firm.

La monotonia, un lavoro fisso che non portava a niente, anime che cercavano altre anime per sfuggire ad imbarazzanti silenzi ed una città senza stimoli che cercava di camuffare la noia dietro falsi sorrisi, musica assordante e belle gambe inavvicinabili. Niente di buono. Ma era incredibile come la gente riusciva ad adattarsi

wow, a change, you know. that's what kills a man: lack of change.

Nature's success stories, they are like Gause's protozoans; the world is their petri dish. Their populations grow at a terrific rate; they take over large areas, engulfing their environment as if no force opposed them. Then they hit a barrier. They drown in their own wastes. They starve from lack of food. Something figures out how to eat them.

testament to the human capacity to adapt (or, less charitably, to our ability to operate in ignorance).

How could these hierarchical, acquisitive, market-oriented, monotheistic, ethnocentric newcomers have absorbed ideas and customs from the egalitarian, reciprocal, noncapitalistic, pantheistic, ethnocentric natives? The

The impossibility of passing beyond slash-and-burn, Meggers said, was a consequence of a more general "law of environmental limitation of culture." And she stated the law, italicizing its importance: "The level to which a culture can develop is dependent upon the agricultural potentiality of the environment it occupies

European visitors marveled at the number of nut and fruit trees and the big clearings with only a dim apprehension that the two might be due to the same human source.

Felling a single four-foot tree with an indigenous stone axe would take 115 hours—nearly three weeks of eight-hour days. With a steel axe, workers could topple the same tree in less than three hours.

Unsurprisingly, people with stone implements wanted metal tools as soon as they encountered them—the prospective reduction in workload was staggering

Only when an unknown genius discovered naturally mutated grain plants that did not shatter—and purposefully selected, protected, and cultivated them—did true agriculture begin.

Earthworms, mosquitoes, and cockroaches; honeybees, dandelions, and African grasses; rats of every description—all of them poured from the hulls of Colón's vessels and those that followed, rushing like eager tourists into lands that had never seen their like before.

Almost seventy years ago the Cuban folklorist Fernando Ortiz Fernández coined the awkward but useful term "transculturation" to describe what happens when one group of people takes something—a song, a food, an ideal—from another. Almost inevitably, Ortiz noted, the new thing is transformed; people make it their own by adapting, stripping, and twisting it to fit their needs and situation.