Quotes About Adaptation

You have to maintain a culture of transformation and stay true to your values.

I try to stay the same, but I also think that change is inevitable. What I mean is, if you stay the same as in your rookie days, you can't deal with all the new responsibilities you are faced with. Of course, my most important values should stay the same.

Each generation's job is to question what parents accept on faith, to explore possibilities, and adapt the last generation's system of values for a new age.

I feel a little schizophrenic because my life is so totally different from here, obviously. And the French values are so different from American values.

I not only lived physically away from my native land, but the values and critical judgments of those closest to me became stranger and stranger.

I had been used to chatter. To sit quietly did not come easy. However, with time and patience, I was learning.

Wynn laughed. "Well, there's a saying," he mused, "that a moose is a horse made by a committee." We chuckled together at Wynn's joke.

Daniel Kahneman says ruminating on what went wrong makes evolutionary sense. Our ancestors survived by remembering the one poisonous berry they encountered and telling their friends about it. Describing the ten tasty ones didn't do much good at all. We

It's such a waste of mental energy to be furious that something isn't the way you want it to be. Fighting life is what causes problems. When you can accept life on life's terms, you pave the way for a measure of peace that you miss otherwise," she said.

In our first issue of 1983 we reported on a new piece of equipment only available in Japan, the $1,000 compact disc player, with the headline "Will the Compact Disc Make the LP Obsolete?

Because you've survived, there is a next strategy.

Many of our problems are broadly similar to those that undermined ... Norse Greenland, and that many other past societies also struggled to solve. Some of those past societies failed (like the Greenland Norse) and others succeeded ... The past offers us a rich database from which we can learn in order that we may keep on succeeding.

In short, we evolved, like other animals, to win the reproduction game. That contest has a single aim, to leave as many descendants as possible.

INVENTING A WRITING system from scratch must have been incomparably more difficult than borrowing and adapting one. The first scribes had to settle on basic principles that we now take for granted. For example, they had to figure out how to decompose a continuous utterance into speech units, regardless of whether those units were taken as words, syllables, or phonemes. They

New Guineans old and young routinely eat mice, spiders, frogs, and other small animals that peoples elsewhere with access to large domestic mammals or large wild game species do not bother to eat. Protein

In areas where there were only hunter-gatherers to begin with, those groups of hunter-gatherers who adopted food production outbred those who didn't.

The seeds of many wild plant species actually must pass through an animal's gut before they can germinate. For instance, one African melon species is so well adapted to being eaten by a hyena-like animal called the aardvark that most melons of that species grow on the latrine sites of aardvarks.

What doesn't kill us makes us stronger." Winston Churchill's corresponding quip was "Never let a good crisis go to waste!" A

Factual knowledge is not always sufficient by itself to motivate an adaptive behavior. At times a symbolic belief system that departs from factual reality fares better.

the striking differences between the long-term histories of peoples of the different continents have been due not to innate differences in the peoples themselves but to differences in their environments.

Chinese culture is still so great in Japan and Korea that Japan has no thought of discarding its Chinese-derived writing system despite its drawbacks for representing Japanese speech, while Korea is only now replacing its clumsy Chinese-derived writing with its wonderful indigenous han'g?l alphabet.

or just inventing a new letter (as our medieval ancestors did when they created the new letters j, u, and w).

Individuals in crisis often receive help from friends, just as nations in crisis may recruit help from allied nations. Individuals in crisis may model their solutions on ways in which they see other individuals addressing similar crises; nations in crisis may borrow and adapt solutions already devised by other nations facing similar problems. Individuals in crisis may derive self-confidence from having survived previous crises; so do nations.

With no other accessible islands to colonize, the Moriori had to remain in the Chathams, and to learn how to get along with each other. They did so by renouncing war, and they reduced potential conflicts from overpopulation by castrating some male infants. The result was a small, unwarlike population with simple technology and weapons, and without strong leadership or organization.