Quotes About Adaptation

There's no such thing as survival of the fittest. Survival of the most adequate, maybe. It doesn't matter whether a solution's optimal. All that matters is whether it beats the alternatives.

PREDATORS RUN FOR THEIR DINNER. PREY RUN FOR THEIR LIVES. —OLD ECOLOGIST'S PROVERB

ALL ANIMALS ARE UNDER STRINGENT SELECTION PRESSURE TO BE AS STUPID AS THEY CAN GET AWAY WITH. —PETE RICHERSON AND ROBERT BOYD

You have a naïve understanding of evolutionary processes. There's no such thing as survival of the fittest. Survival of the most adequate, maybe.

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing— irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness.

I was trying to get a handle on Blindsight; I entertained and discarded any number of adaptive functions in search of that grand thematic punchline that would end the book. Yes, my protagonist would realize, self-awareness is absolutely essential because of X. The problem was, I couldn't find an X that stood up under scrutiny; and it took me far too long to realize that Consciousness is good for nothing at all was the scariest and most existentially gut-churning punchline imaginable.

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing—irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness. By now you don't experience the world as it exists at all. You experience a simulation built from assumptions.

Hell, Neil Gaiman took a classic that nine-year-old Peter Watts devoured without any trouble at all—Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book—and dumbed it down to an (admittedly award-winning) story about ghosts and vampires, aimed at an audience who might find a story about sapient wolves and tigers too challenging. It may only be a matter of time before Nineteen Eighty Four is reissued using only words from the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary.

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies.

Technology is a stunted thing in benign environments, it never thrived in any culture gripped by belief in natural harmony. Why

As far as anyone could tell, Portia had learned to partition its cognitive processes: almost as if it were emulating a larger brain piece by piece, saving the results of one module to feed into the next. Slices of intellect, built and demolished one after another.

Maybe the Singularity happened years ago. We just don't want to admit we were left behind.

Half my age, and she's probably already forgotten the difference between the meat she was born with and the chrome that came after.

I don't know what parts of me the Ceph have blown away and I don't know how much else has been broken down to keep the rest of me going, but I know that at least my balls are still intact. I know this because I can feel them crawling back up into my abdomen.

The moved and the shaken.

By now it's got as much in common with its origins as a humpback whale would have with the sperm cells from a therapsid lizard. Still

there's no such thing as a one-size-fits-all survival strategy

If we're so unfit, why haven't we gone extinct? Why? Because natural selection takes time, and luck plays a role. The game isn't over. The game is never over; and so, neither can there be any winners. There are only those who haven't yet lost.

Good parasites are invisible; the best are indispensable.

when a lemur makes a human, it doesn't matter how many lemur chains and lemur rules and lemur constraints she imposes. She's simply, computationally incapable of seeing all the angles that her smarter creation can take in at a glance.

The GA's new recruits have to be the slowest learners since the eradication of Down's syndrome.

SPECIES USED TO GO EXTINCT. NOW THEY GO ON HIATUS. —Deborah MacLennan, Tables of our Reconstruction

If you've got the senses and reflexes to hide between someone's saccades, why stop there? Why not do something that really works?

You have a naïve understanding of evolutionary processes. There's no such thing as survival of the fittest. Survival of the most adequate, maybe. It doesn't matter whether a solution's optimal. All that matters is whether it beats the alternatives.