Quotes About Adaptation

New mutations don't create new species; they create offspring that are impaired.

Although random mutations influenced the course of evolution, their influence was mainly by loss, alteration, and refinement... Never, however, did that one mutation make a wing, a fruit, a woody stem, or a claw appear. Mutations, in summary, tend to induce sickness, death, or deficiencies. No evidence in the vast literature of heredity changes shows unambiguous evidence that random mutation itself, even with geographical isolation of populations, leads to speciation.

Possibly here in the Holocene, or just before ten or twenty thousand years ago, life hit a peek of diversity. Then we appeared. We are the great meteorite.

Sergestid shrimp, he suggests, acquired, integrated, and put to work at least four intact genomes. To Williamson the inheritance of these acquired genomes, not random mutations, determines the evolutionary success of these shrimp today.

She met adversity with information.

SECRET #47 When life gives you a pile of poop, you're gonna get dirty—so you may as well roll with it.

And yet, I suppose you mourn the loss or the death of what you thought your life was, even if you find your life is better after. You mourn the future that you thought you'd planned.

When you've loved somebody for a long time, and then it stops, it's akin to an amputation in that you go on feeling the cut-off part long after it's been taken away. All sorts of nervous and emotional impulses set out to travel to their accustomed stations, and when they come up against the new, raw barrier, they're carried through it by their own impetus, and only then, finding themselves shooting through empty space, do they dwindle and die away.

Yet when we do manage to create ourselves anew, isn't there always a suspicion that the new identity fits over the old like a second skin, at times itchy or uncomfortably tight, not quite covering the most vulnerable patches?

We have to be willing to let go of that's just the way it is, even if just for a moment, to consider the possibility that there isn't a way it is or way it isn't. There is the way we choose to act and what we choose to make of circumstances.

Like a tree, a woman can't carry the weight of two seasons simultaneously. In the violent struggle of trying, she'll miss every bit of joy each season promises to bring.

People with a realistic view see rejections as a natural part of life and adjust accordingly. It

I have discovered that if I can change the way I think about something, I can change the way I react to it. If I change the way I react, I can change the way I define myself as a mother.

But, instead of wallowing in what I can't have, I'm making the choice to celebrate what I can have.

We don't think about fixing things until we realize they are broken.

She refuses to be a victim of a circumstance she can't fully change. Instead she changes what she can.

Rewriting the go-to scripts is one of the most crucial steps toward permanent progress.

Take in the ideas of the day, drain off those of yesterday.

Boulevards are like people: similar in their youth, they undergo gradual change according to what ferments in them.

Nations that can manage to develop their language and make it accommondating while at the same time staying faithful to the roots of it are the most communicative societies that are also most dynamic in thought.

An adaptive agent is constantly playing a game with its environment. What exactly does that mean? Distilled to the essence, what actually has to happen for game-playing agents to survive and prosper? Two things, Holland decided: prediction and feedback.

It will require the renunciation or sublimation or transformation of our traditional appetites: to outbreed, outconsume, and conquer our rivals, especially our rivals in other tribes. These impulses may once have been adaptive. Indeed, they may even be hard-wired into our brains. But we no longer have the luxury of tolerating them. And

Another TX-0 hacker devised what was essentially the first word processor, a program that allowed you to type in your class reports and then format the text for output on the Flexowriter. Since it made the three-million-dollar TX-0 behave like a three-hundred-dollar typewriter—much to the outrage of traditionalists who saw this, too, as a ludicrous waste of computer power—the program became known as Expensive Typewriter.

Like it or not, the marketplace isn't stable. The world isn't stable. It's full of evolution, upheaval, and surprise.