Quotes About Adaptation

Different peoples acquired food production at different times in prehistory.

Quite a few inventions do conform to this commonsense view of necessity as invention's mother.

shared among all of those types of crisis, whatever their cause, is the sense that something important about one's current approach to life isn't working, and that one has to find a new approach.

Two million years ago, several proto-human lineages had coexisted side by side until a shake-up left only one. It now appears that a similar shake-up occurred within the last 60,000 years, and that all of us alive in the world today are descended from the winner of that upheaval. What was the last missing ingredient whose acquisition helped our ancestor to win?

That was part of the reason why my 1959 crisis was so traumatic to me: it was my first acute life crisis. By comparison, my 1980 and 2000 professional crises were un-traumatic. I did eventually switch career directions from membrane physiology to evolutionary physiology around 1980, and from physiology to geography after 2000. But those decisions weren't painful, because I had come to assume from my previous experience that things would probably turn out OK.

If circumstances change, your decisions can change. Decisions are temporary.

Unless you are a fortune-teller, long-term business planning is a fantasy

Top-down change without honest feedback from those affected by the change simply will not work.

Process helps make sense of change, but blindly following a process is a recipe for disaster

El cambio es tanto un arte como una ciencia

If you truly want to understand something, try to change it - Kurt Lewin -

Disruptive innovation is good. Disruption for the sake of disruption is not. Culture

Lean Change Management moves the slider for managing change from using plan-driven aproaches to feedback-driven aproaches

Being right is the enemy of staying right because it leads you to forget the way the world works

we often find out that what we thought we wanted before we got it is no longer what we really want once we have it.

History has rewritten itself so many times I'm not really sure how it was to begin with -- it's a bit like trying to guess the original color of a wall when it's been repainted eight times.

Ill-fitting grammar are like ill-fitting shoes. You can get used to it for a bit, but then one day your toes fall off and you can't walk to the bathroom.

Cats aren't really friendly, they're just cozying up to the dominant life-form as a hedge against extinction.

DCI Horner's advice to Jack Spratt: Remember, m'boy, his old boss had said, eyes twinkling, that if anyone tries to get the better of you, stand up straight and say to yourself in an imperious air, 'I am the new Mrs. de Winter now!' You'll find it works wonders.

I also read about Heathcliff's unexpected three-year career in Hollywood under the name Buck Stallion and his eventual return to the pages of Wuthering Heights.

Unless the hole is MEANT to be square,' I said with a sudden erudition that surprised me, 'in which case, all the round pegs are the ones that are wrong, and if the ROUND hole is one that is not meant to be square, then the square ones will, no, hang on--' 'Shame,' said the historian, 'and you were doing so well.

I've got six months to sort out the hackers, get the Japanese knotweed under control and find an acceptable form of narcissus.

What's with the iMagic name change?' I said without preamble. 'Industrial Magic was a bit of a mouthful,' he explained. 'Besides, putting an iin front of anything makes it more hip and current.

On one memorable occasion Vronsky played all the parts in an abridged version of Anna Karenina when the rest of the cast were on strike for more blinis.