Quotes About Adaptation

Asking if a particular trait is due to nature or nurture implies a false dichotomy between nature, genes, and evolution on the one side and between nurture and environment on the other. In fact, all of it is evolutionary.

What, then, might deodorants and perfumes have done to our ability to smell the signals emitted by our bodies? What might lives filled with clocks have done to our sense of time? What have airplanes done to our sense of space, or the internet to our sense of competence? What have maps done to our sense of direction, or schools to our sense of family? You get the point.

Group membership never disappears, but an organism will try to pass as something it's not, if enough of its traits transform. We are nucleate, heterotrophic, vertebral, brainy, bony fish. We are fish.

we are all distinct—what will work for one person may not work for another; this variation between individuals is perhaps the most fundamental of evolutionary observations.

the human niche is niche switching. More specifically, we argue that the human niche is to move between the paired, inverse modes of culture and consciousness.

Employing evolutionary logic is not exclusively about discovering our strengths; it is also about understanding our weaknesses and when to augment with modern solutions.

Dogs are in many ways a human construct. We have co-evolved with them for so long that they are now attuned to human behavior, language, and emotion.

We are experiencing changes across the full spectrum of our experience: to our bodies, our diet, our sleep, and so much more. many of these changes have come so fast and furious that we should not be surprised when they create damage that is difficult to undo.

Even though it is logically obvious that we must accept equilibrium, we are not built to be satisfied with it because being unsatisfied has been an excellent strategy for the last several billion years.

If culture was not paying its way, the genes whose expression it is modifying would either go extinct or evolve to be as immune to culture as an oak tree.

If he ever changes his stance on something, it's because he's received new information.

that was New York for you, always changing. New groups of people came in on a daily basis. Some people liked it, some people continued to hate foreigners, even though they themselves had been the foreigners of a previous decade or century.

English arrived, they bastardized the name to Key West.

At some point you just have to let go of what you thought should happen and live in what is happening.

Sometimes life isn't what you thought it would be it's just what it is.

I'd like to tell you it gets easier, but it doesn't. It just gets different.

Change is the nature of life, Cassidy. Some of it's good, like new babies being born and children growing up and leaving home and all the new adventures that both of those things bring. And sometimes change is more difficult - like when your dad died. But it's nothing to fear. Good or bad, when we rise up to meet it, change can make us stronger. It's what moved us farther along down the road ahead.

Math is "maths," an elevator is a "lift," a truck is a "lorry," a flashlight is a "torch," and "crisps" are what they call potato chips, while "chips" over here means French fries. Just as riding the double-decker buses thrills me, I get a thrill out of hearing people talk.

Football means soccer, squash is soda, bonkers is nuts—I'm going to need an interpreter or something.

Broadening Horizons for Over a Century,

Part of being a parent is rolling with the punches, so consider an unexpected pregnancy the universe's way of helping you to learn to do that.

Do not confine your children to your own learning, for they were born in another time.

Just when we think we've figured things out, the universe throws us a curveball. —Meredith Grey, Grey's Anatomy

Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change. —Mary Shelley, Frankenstein