Quotes About Adaptation

defines domestication as "the human creation of a new form of plant or animal—one that is identifiably different from its wild ancestors and extant wild relatives.

eBooks are just digital copies of analog books. Convenient, yes. But we have the technology now to rethink what a book is.

Long live the New Flesh!

Or was it a more sinister thing? Was the iPhone a malevolent protean organism, the stem-cell phone, mocking him who had cameras with real physical shutters whose sound you couldn't turn off? Promising to replace every other device on earth with its shape-shifting self—garage door openers, solar timers, television remotes, car keys, guitar tuners, GPS modules, light meters, spirit levels, you name it?

Was the iPhone a malevolent protean organism, the stem-cell phone, mocking him who had cameras with real physical shutters whose sound you couldn't turn off? Promising to replace every other device on earth with its shape-shifting self – garage door openers, solar timers, television remotes, car keys, guitar tuners, GPS modules, light meters, spirit levels, you name it?

The only languages which do not change are dead ones.

This is a lesson everyone who studies language eventually learns. You cannot stop language change. You may not like it ; you may regret the arrival of new forms and the passing of old ones but there is not the slightest thing you can do about it. Language change is as natural as breathing. It is one of the linguistic facts of life.

Mixed accents are the norm these days. Even if you don't travel, you're not immune from accent shift. Innumerable voices enter your home every day through radio, television, the telephone, and the internet.

Old attitudes die hard, of course, and there will still be those who mourn the passing of the days when a single accent ruled the British airwaves. But they are a steadily shrinking minority.

The most general way of stating the central assertion of the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution is that a population of replicators subject to variation (for instance by imperfect copying) will be taken over by those variants that are better than their rivals at causing themselves to be replicated. This

a population of replicators subject to variation (for instance by imperfect copying) will be taken over by those variants that are better than their rivals at causing themselves to be replicated.

We shall always be faced with the problem of how to plan for an unknowable future.

Unless a society is expecting its own future choices to be better than its present ones, it will strive to make its present policies and institutions as immutable as possible.

As the ancient philosopher Heraclitus remarked, 'No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.

Changing our genes in order to improve our lives and to facilitate further improvements is no different in this regard from augmenting our skin with clothes or our eyes with telescopes.

The history of invention is not the history of a necessary future to which we must adapt or die, but rather of failed futures, and of futures firmly fixed in the past.

Some of the steps you take may end up being detours or out-and-out mistakes. By staying focused on your vision, though, you'll find even those steps useful in the creating process.

If you try to fit the mold of your organization too much, the rap will be that you are too dull or too dry or too sycophantic. So you might as well be yourself and get points for having the courage of your own style.

Being transformed also means being unconformed.

You make trannie yet, joey." I

Large-scale problems do not require large-scale solutions; they require small-scale solutions within a large-scale framework.

Forward movement is not helpful if what is needed is a change of direction.

Although she didn't know what to say. She was under the impression that she was going to have to go back and start again at zero, even relearn language. Maybe in the end all of them had been right to force her to socialize a bit, to force her to wash, dress, entertain. Her