Quotes About Adaptation

We are the only primates that can tap our foot or move our body in time with a specific rhythm. It's wired into us, but not into our chimp or gorilla cousins, which tells us that it is a trait that like language, big toes, and toolmaking evolved sometime over the past seven million years.

Today we are even manipulating the DNA that makes us possible in the first place—a case of evolution evolving new ways to evolve. (Think about that for a moment.)

The question now is, can we survive ourselves? Can we even manage to become the next human?

DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music. —Richard Dawkins

The need is not really for more brains, the need is now for a gentler, a more tolerant people than those who won for us against the ice, the tiger and the bear. The hand that hefted the ax, out of some old blind allegiance to the past, fondles the machine gun as lovingly. It is a habit man will have to break to survive, but the roots go very deep. —Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey In

SAY EXACTLY what you think until you find that no one is listening then say something else

SILVANA, I SAID: "You're in a pickle." "Yeah, I know, but I've gotten used to living in brine.

El modelo tradicional de promoción, comercialización y distribución de música ha perdido vigencia. Los principales sellos discográficos y el sistema de distribución minorista que adquirió dimensiones colosales gracias a la fábrica de éxitos de la radio se encuentran con un modelo empresarial dependiente de los grandes éxitos; y ahora ya no hay suficientes discos de oro y de platino. Estamos asistiendo al fin de una era.

Along with the fragmentation of markets is coming the fragmentation of marketing.

professional journalists who are seeing their jobs evaporate are typically those whose employers failed to find a new role in a world of abundant information. By and large, that means newspapers, which are an industry that will probably have to reinvent itself as dramatically as music labels. The top tier (the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, etc.) will probably shrink a bit, and the tier below that may be decimated.

8. Embrace waste.

If you think about it, today's hit is tomorrow's niche. Almost

As a species, we're either very resilient or super callous. I don't know which.

sometimes you just have to bury the dead and move on.

normalcy bias. We suppose the world will continue to spin the way it always has. We tell ourselves that what we are seeing isn't, in fact, the cataclysm that it is.

Understandably, our Darwinian bodies and primitive brains are not going to catch up with this astonishing state of affairs. We live, in this new safety, in this new time of plenty, like drunken sailors freshly delivered from terrible peril.

Biologists now believe that most cells in your body are designed to fall apart after relatively short life spans, partly to let you adapt to new circumstances and partly because older cells tend to get cancer, making immortal cells not such a great idea.

We used it every winter, and in every time of drought or famine. We survived by getting depressed. Not clinically depressed, or Prozac depressed, but survival depressed, as in let's slow down the metabolism, build up the fat stores, withdraw, turn inward, hibernate, cut everything back to bare minimum. Shut down and survive by letting all but the most critical systems atrophy and decay. In fact, all chronic stress works the same way.

I want that person you knew to return. But the truth is, this may be the best we achieve. Today, having her here and comfortable and not agitated…that may be as good as we get. Are you okay with that?

We all make mistakes. That's why my pencil has an eraser.

The future belongs to the puzzle solvers.

When I run in the morning, my body spends the first 20 minutes trying to figure out what's happening to it.

When I do an hour-and-a-half show, if I don't improvise 20 minutes worth of new material each night, I feel I've let myself down.

People don't want to embrace culture shifts because it's not going to happen in the next 20 minutes.