Quotes About Adaptation

wenn etwas zerbricht, dann ist es nicht das zerbrechen, was verhindert, dass sich alles wieder fügt. es liegt daran, dass ein stück verloren gegangen ist, und sei es auch noch so winzig - die beiden verbliebenen stücke passen einfach nicht mehr zueinander, egal was man versucht. die gesamte struktur hat sich verändert.

The only way to deal with the future is to make sure the present is okay.

The good old days needed a lot of improvement. People aren't the only things that get better with age.

I'm always jealous of people who get to be new to New York because they get to be amazed by it... I worry that it's like living at a high elevation. I've gotten used to breathing here and every part of my body is tuned to living here.

Our brains needed to be able to do more than simply create models of the world. The power of imagination took root in the brains of our ancestors because it helped them predict uncertain futures.

Women past and present face the adaptive problem of choosing men who not only have the necessary resources but also show a willingness to commit those resources specifically to them. This problem may be more difficult than it seems at first. Although resources can often be directly observed, commitment cannot. Instead, gauging commitment requires looking for probabilistic cues. Love is one of the most important cues to commitment.

molecular genetic studies show that there has been an acceleration of human adaptive evolution over the past 40,000 years, and especially during the past 10,000 years

Como en el resto de las tendencias destructivas, el hecho de que el empleo del maltrato tenga una lógicas adaptativa subyacente no significa que debamos aceptarlo, desearlo o descuidar su erradicación. Por el contrario, una mayor comprensión de la lógica que subyace a tales tácticas y de los contextos en que se producen puede llevar a métodos más eficaces para reducirlas o eliminarlas.

All of us descend from a long and unbroken line of ancestors who competed successfully for desirable mates, attracted mates who were reproductively valuable, retained mates long enough to reproduce, fended off interested rivals, and solved the problems that could have impeded reproductive success.

Sólo examinando el complejo repertorio de estrategias sexuales humanas sabremos de dónde procedemos; sólo comprendiendo por qué han evolucionado controlaremos hacia dónde vamos.

Nuestros mecanismos de emparejamiento son los fósiles vivientes que nos indican lo que somos y de dónde venimos.

In short, men low in desirability, as indicated by being unemployed, unmarried, and young, seem especially prone to risk taking, which sometimes becomes lethal. The point is not that killing per se is necessarily an adaptation but rather that men's evolved sexual psychologies are designed to respond to dire mating conditions by increasing the amount of risk they are willing to take.

Darwin hat a wonderful scientific habit of noticing facts that seemed inconsistent with his theories.

For every incremental gain in men's ability to deceive women, women evolve comparable incremental gains in their ability to detect deception.

Quienes no se emparejan no se convierten en antepasados. Cada ser humano, por lo tanto, desciende de una línea larga e ininterrumpida de otros que se emparejaron con éxito a lo largo de millones de años. Si uno de nuestros antepasados no hubiera conseguido salvar los complejos obstáculos que supone el emparejamiento, no estaríamos vivos para reflexionar sobre tales hechos improbables.

Quienes en nuestro pasado evolutivo no consiguieron emparejarse de forma adecuada no se convirtieron en nuestros antepasados.

Pervive en nosotros el legado sexual de esas historias de éxito.

permanecer con un mal compañero no contribuye a que una persona transmita sus genes con éxito. Descendemos de quienes supieron cuándo cortar la relación.

Evolution operates by the ruthless criterion of reproductive success, no matter how repugnant we may find the strategies produced by that process, and no matter how abhorrent the consequences of those strategies may be.

Del mismo modo que hemos desarrollado mecanismos que nos hacen entrar en conflicto, hemos desarrollado otros que nos permiten vivir en armonía con el otro sexo.

Little by little, new facts become blurred through old glasses fitted, as it were, for the needs of another generation; older men, assuming that the scene is the same as it was in the past, cease to explore or inquire into the present or the future."7

People change in some ways as they grow; in other ways they don't.

The world, for Achilles, reassembled itself around a new centre.

Even the memory then, of what once was, will have grown dim in the minds of a generation who, for the whole of their lives, have known nothing but chaos and lawlessness.