Quotes About Adaptation

We decided that sooner or later you had to learn to live without almost everybody, at least for a while. Even people you didn't think you could live without." p 167 love always found itself again.

We will never reach the world for Christ in our generation if we simply follow in the groove worn for us by our predecessors.

Once again we see not only additions to the English word-hoard but new ideas being introduced or current ideas being given a name – 'humanity', 'pollute', which then, as words often do, took on a larger and more complex life. New words are new worlds. You call them up and if they are strong enough, they keep in step with change and along the way describe more and more, provide new insights, evolve on the tongue and on the page.

He wanted to remove silent letters and reform the whole business. He sent his scheme to his friend May Stevenson in a letter beginning: 'Diir Frind' but May replied that she could 'si meni inkanviiniensis az vel az difikylties'. That stopped it.

Before the fifteenth century was out, William Caxton had printed two editions of The Canterbury Tales and they have never been out of print since. They have been enjoyed, imitated, copied, re-translated, put on stage, screen and radio, and generations have rightly regarded Chaucer as the father and founding genius of English literature.

English, like water, will find its own level. The language itself through usage and natural selection will see that what is survivable will survive.

That, too, is part of this adventure — there are both casualties and survivors as this hungry creature, English, demanded more and more subjects.

One aspect of English which has been a recurring feature in its history is the way a word will be adapted from one age to another so that a 'chip' can go from wood to silicon, include golf and a slight and feature as fifty per cent of a British diet.

and, the highlight, Cristiano Ronaldo weeping on the grass after a knee injury in the 24th minute, while a lone Autographa gamma sips his teardrops away.

In other words, Passer domesticus has become an urban species because it was already adapted to a lifestyle that, purely by accident, prepared it for the niches that we have created in cities. The urban environment offers conditions that happen to resemble one or more aspects of a species' way of living in pre-urban times. And it is those species that are pre-adapted to the novel niches in the city. They are the first to move in.

Roughly, with every tenfold increase in island size, the number of species you find there doubles.

Cities are the world's new vacant niches, and the blackbird is one species that has embarked on the road toward speciating to maximize its profits from this horn of plenty,

That is why urban evolution can proceed so rapidly: the animals and plants that need to adapt to whatever new feature humans release in their urban environment do not need to wait for the right mutations to come along. Mostly, the necessary gene variants are already there, waiting in the wings of the standing genetic variation. It only takes natural selection to bring them out into the limelight, and give them a chance to shine.

The closest relatives of bed bugs (Cimex lectularius) are parasites of cave bats—which indicates that that was also bed bugs' original niche.

What she means is that cities exchange not only species, but also the human inventions that make those cities tick and that urban organisms must adapt to.

that inconsistent of me? No—of course we must regret what we lose, but that does not mean that what we gain is worthless.

Parakeets in Paris … It could be the name of a hypnotic Matisse painting, but since the 1970s it has been a very realistic image for the French capital. In fact, the ring-necked parakeet (Psittacula krameri) is one of the birds that has been most successful in invading cities in Europe (on a smaller scale, also in Japan, North America, the Middle East, and Australia).

For all we know, our ancestors may have had better reproductive success not because they were smart, but because they were emotionally sensitive, dynamically moody, and ridden with anxiety. In other words, it makes sense to hold up an evolutionary lens to mental disorders because they might not be disorders at all, but adaptations.

Perhaps periods of anxiety, sadness, panic, and sheer craziness are just part of the mental continuum that nature has provided to help us stay alive, make babies, and pass on genes.

Everything falls apart so you can begin rebuilding yourself and your new reality.

When I grew up there wasn't air-conditioning or anything of that nature, and this old car had a wall thickness of about ten inches. So we had a little warmer house in the winter and a little cooler in the summer.

It's interesting to do other people's music - that's how I learned to play, by learning other people's songs. It's nice to delve into how other people got to where they are.

Ugly and ungainly. The least dependable creature you ever met. Just when you think you understand her, she changes. If only I had a son," he said bitterly. Over and over he disparaged her, and George would have thought that Beatrice would be so used to it, she could not be hurt further. But he saw her neck grow stiffer and stiffer.

Quanto mais inabitável, mais o mundo fica povoado