Quotes About Adaptation

Plant domestication may be defined as growing a plant and thereby, consciously or unconsciously, causing it to change genetically from its wild ancestor in ways making it more useful to human consumers.

Jared Diamond

plant domestication is not a matter of hunter-gatherers' domesticating a single plant and otherwise carrying on unchanged with their nomadic lifestyle.

from our point of view, genital sores, diarrhea, and coughing are "symptoms of disease." From a germ's point of view, they're clever evolutionary strategies to broadcast the germ. That's why it's in the germ's interests to "make us sick." But why should a germ evolve the apparently self-defeating strategy of killing its host?

New signs were created by combining old signs to produce new meanings: for example, the sign for head was combined with the sign for bread in order to produce a sign signifying eat.

Jared Diamond

After people reached Australia, that continent lost its giant kangaroos, its 'marsupial lion', and other giant marsupials.

don't know whether Pertamina policies have changed since then.

About 15,000 years ago, the American West looked much as Africa's Serengeti Plains do today, with herds of elephants and horses pursued by lions and cheetahs, and joined by members of such exotic species as camels and giant ground sloths.

But big mammal domestication virtually ended 4,500 years ago. By then, all of the world's 148 candidate big species must have been tested innumerable times, with the result that only a few passed the test and no other suitable ones remained.

Europeans have never learned to survive in Australia or New Guinea without their inherited Eurasian technology.

we can recognize at least six groups of reasons for failed domestication.

these differences between the Fertile Crescent, New Guinea, and the eastern United States followed straightforwardly from the differing suites of wild plant and animal species available for domestication, not from limitations of the peoples themselves.

Australia / New Guinea today has no equally large mammals, in fact no mammal larger than 100-pound kangaroos. But Australia / New Guinea formerly had its own suite of diverse big mammals, including giant kangaroos, rhinolike marsupials called diprotodonts and reaching the size of a cow, and a marsupial "leopard." It also formerly had a 400-pound ostrichlike flightless bird, plus some impressively big reptiles, including a one-ton lizard, a giant python, and land-dwelling crocodiles.

Only after about 20 years did Edison reluctantly concede that the main use of his phonograph was to record and play music.

DOMESTICABLE ANIMALS ARE ALL ALIKE; EVERY UNDOMESTICABLE animal is undomesticable in its own way.

Today the most numerous Native American tribe in the United States is the Navajo, who on European arrival were just one of several hundred tribes. But the Navajo proved especially resilient and able to deal selectively with innovation. They incorporated Western dyes into their weaving, became silversmiths and ranchers, and now drive trucks while continuing to live in traditional dwellings

Yes, environmental problems do constrain human societies, but the societies' responses also make a difference. So

climate. Perhaps

La historia siguió trayectorias distintas para diferentes pueblos debido a las diferencias existentes en los entornos de los pueblos, no debido a diferencias biológicas entre los propios pueblos».

Perhaps cold climates require one to be more technologically inventive to survive, because one must build a warm home and make warm clothing, whereas one can survive in the tropics with simpler housing and no clothing. Or the argument can be reversed to reach the same conclusion: the long winters at high latitudes leave people with much time in which to sit indoors and invent.

diseases represent evolution in progress, and microbes adapt by natural selection to new hosts and vectors.

As a result, over the course of history, human populations repeatedly exposed to a particular pathogen have come to consist of a higher proportion of individuals with those genes for resistance—just because unfortunate individuals without the genes were less likely to survive to pass their genes on to babies.

For example, typhus was initially transmitted between rats by rat fleas, which sufficed for a while to transfer typhus from rats to humans. Eventually, typhus microbes discovered that human body lice offered a much more efficient method of traveling directly between humans. Now that Americans have mostly deloused themselves, typhus has discovered a new route into us: by infecting eastern North American flying squirrels and then transferring to people whose attics harbor flying squirrels.