Quotes About Adaptation

For the virus had not disappeared. It had only gone underground, like a forest fire left burning in the roots, swarming and mutating, adapting, honing itself, watching and waiting, waiting to burst into flame.

Whenever a new variant of the influenza virus does adapt to humans, it will threaten to spread rapidly across the world. It will threaten a pandemic.

But the virus can adapt to man. It can do so directly, with an entire animal virus jumping to humans and adapting with a simple mutation. It can also happen indirectly. For one final and unusual attribute of the influenza virus makes it particularly adept at moving from species to species.

If the Hong Kong chicken influenza had infected someone who was simultaneously infected with a human influenza virus, the two viruses might easily have reassorted their genes. They might have formed a new virus that could pass easily from person to person. And the lethal virus might have adapted to humans.

Public health experts monitor this drift and each year adjust the flu vaccine to try to keep pace. But they will never be able to match up perfectly, because even if they predict the direction of mutation, the fact that influenza viruses exist as mutating swarms means some will always be different enough to evade both the vaccine and the immune system.

In fact, biology is chaos. Biological systems are the product not of logic but of evolution, an inelegant process.

Natural selection is intolerant of idle verbosity.

In a world where so much of our natural heritage is being lost, why not celebrate the few bright spots where it is surviving and adapting?

pace of genetic selection, recombination

The pessimist complains about the wind. The optimist expects it to change. The leader adjusts the sails.

Life is 10% of what happens to us and 90% of how we react to it

A good deal of education consists of unlearning-the breaking of bad habits as with a tennis serve.

Education is only like good culture,--it changes the size, but not the sort.

Only a Scotsman can really survive a Scottish education.

I had the most beautiful set of theories you ever knew when I started out as a schoolma'am, but every one of them has failed me at some pinch or another.

We must do better or perish as the nation we know today.

If you just take a single human and put him or her in the forest he or she might not do very well without some sort of education which he got or she got from some tribe.

Higher education is a business that doesn't know it's going out of business.

Education doesn't need to be reformed- it needs to be transformed.

I had no real education because I was in and out of schools so I decided that I would completely change my look, change my image, change my name and move to New York.

You think education is something to be done when all else fails?

I am Welsh by birth, English by education, and European by nature.

In education, parody is obsolete.

Education is at a turning point