Quotes About Adaptation

In a time of chaos, it is the micro-manager who ascends

we shall quickly find ourselves about as important to the algorithms as animals currently are to us.

the state of the future will need to function more like the human immune system

When you are born in one century and find yourself walking around in another there's a certain infirmity to your footing. May we all be so lucky to live long enough to see our time turn to fable.

Each family functions in their own way, by rules reinvented daily. The strangeness of each of us is somehow accommodated so that there can be such a thing as family and we can all live for some time at least in the same house. Normal is what you know.

Having to be sober was like being a forty-year-old trapped in a young adult's body. How could I relate to any of my peers? It was like I'd come from a totally different planet.

You never step into the same river twice,

The lion cannot protect himself from traps, and the fox cannot defend himself from wolves. One must therefore be a fox to recognize traps, and a lion to frighten wolves.

One change always leaves the way open for the establishment of others.

Whosoever desires constant success must change his conduct with the times.

While the way we have come to live in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic might feel alien and unnatural, it is actually neither of those things. Plagues are a feature of the human experience. What happened in 2020 was not new to our species. It was just new to us.

Genes do amazing things inside our bodies, but even more amazing to me is what they do outside of them. Genes affect not only the structure and function of our bodies; not only the structure and function of our minds and, hence, our behaviors; but also the structure and function of our societies.

Once I was a scuba diver in a sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

Experiments show that just as the brain can build new or stronger circuits through physical or mental practice, those circuits can weaken or dissolve with neglect.

The paradox of neuroplasticity, observes Doidge, is that, for all the mental flexibility it grants us, it can end up locking us into "rigid behaviors.

we program our computers and thereafter they program us. Even

The animals' neural pathways have woven themselves into a new map that corresponds to the new arrangement of nerves in their hands. At first, he can't believe what he's seen. Like every other neuroscientist, he's been taught that the structure of the adult brain is fixed.

I felt lost without the Delete key, the scrollbar, the cut and paste functions, the Undo command. I had to do all my editing on-screen. In using the word processor, I had become something of a word processor myself.

Neuroplasticity, argues Pascual-Leone, is one of the most important products of evolution, a trait that enables the nervous system "to escape the restrictions of its own genome and thus adapt to environmental pressures, physiologic changes, and experiences.

What looks like instinct is hard-won skill. Those changes in the brain don't happen through passive observation. They're generated through repeated confrontations with the unexpected.

In the long run, the IT department is unlikely to survive, at least not in its familiar form.

Along Maine's Kennebec River alone, thirty-six companies operated fifty-three icehouses with a total capacity of a million tons. But over the next few decades, cheap electricity devastated the business, first by making the artificial production of ice more economical and then by spurring homeowners to replace their iceboxes with electric refrigerators. As Gavin Weightman writes in The Frozen-Water Trade, the "huge industry simply melted away.

our longstanding idea of a computer is obsolete.

Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I Zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski