Quotes About Adaptation

The real world is not easy to live in. It is rough; it is slippery. Without the most clear-eyed adjustments we fall and get crushed. A man must stay sober: not always, but most of the time.

I realized the other day that I've lived in New York longer than I've lived anywhere else. It's amazing: I am a New Yorker. It's strange I never thought I would be.

Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity. So it's like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You'd better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that's really the only unique situation that's going to be left.

Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming

If it works, it's out of date.

Where subtlety fails us we must simply make do with cream pies.

Change is the very fabric of our time.

Self-awareness is probably overrated. A complex, self-regulating system doesn't need it in order to be successful, or even smart.

The village is coming back, like it or not.

As sci-fi writer Theodore Sturgeon said, 90 percent of everything is crap. But science fiction has not been forgiven for its crap. The reason is that science fiction inherently distrusts the 'eternal verities' on which literature graduates base their doctoral dissertations. Literature departments were uncomfortable with that. But things change.

How do you teach a classroom of Sybils who are breaking apart and reforming right in front of you?

Abilene had gone from boomtown to Bible Belt, from whorehouses to schoolmarms, without any of the intervening phases.

The Orchid and the Dandelion (La orquídea y el diente de león)

Politicians are like weather vanes. Our job is to make the wind blow.

I could only use the formula I knew. Which was, you call a song 'China Girl', it better sound Asian. You call a song 'Let's Dance', you damn well better make sure people dance to it.

We're all designers now. It's time to get good at it.

Why not invest in the future of music, instead of building fortresses to preserve its past?

It didn't even occur to me that I'm the last person in the world who should play salsa or Brazilian music.

Music eats its young and gives birth to a new hybrid creature.

The performing musician was now expected to write and create for two very different spaces: the live venue, and the device that could play a recording or receive a transmission. Socially and acoustically, these spaces were worlds apart. But the compositions were expected to be the same!

Now, why is it that the idea of intention keeps turning up in explanations of adaptation, intruding even into ones where it is supposed to have no place? And why is it as hard, as we saw in the preceding section that it is, to translate the idea of intention out of the explanation of any particular adaptation? "Surely

Darwinians have always owed their readers a translation manual that would "cash" the teleological language which Darwinians avail themselves of without restraint in explaining particular adaptations, into the non-teleological language which their own theory of adaptation requires. But they have never paid, or even tried to pay, this debt.

Darwinians, then, have never paid, or even acknowledged, the debt they have all along owed the public: a reconciliation of their teleological explanations of particular adaptations with their non-teleological explanation of adaptation in general. And not only have they never paid this debt: they have in fact become progressively less conscious, with time, of the fact that they owe this debt. This

There is only so much space on any one person's hard drive, and old memories are prone to replacement by newer ones.