Quotes About Adaptation

Tu non vuoi cambiare il mondo, Archie, tu vuoi capirlo per trovare il modo di riuscire a viverci.

One would have to be nearly unconscious not to see, or at least not to feel, that the house was no longer the same. "Habit", as one of Beckett's characters says, "it's a great deadener", And if the mind is unable to respond to the physical evidence, what will it do when confronted with the emotional evidence?

That's American know-how for you. It keeps coming at you, and every minute there's new junk to push out the old junk.

She was thinking about how her middle-school alma mater was now 75 percent Latino, when in her day it was 80 percent black. Thinking

Yes, being black is a full-time job: sometimes you are invisible, other times you are hyper-visible," he says. "Sometimes you are welcome, other times you are not. The thermostat is always moving and you have to keep adapting to find some comfort level. Richard Pryor used to talk about going to Africa and people there telling him he was white. Even though he was black, he just wasn't black enough.

Slowly but surely, we are acquiring that famous culture of democracy, which is our objective.

What something has evolved for and what something actually does are two separate things. Once we come to possess a capacity, we can use it for unintended purposes

We are not built to be happy. Evolution doesn't want us to be in constant bliss any more than it wants us to be pain-free. Pain is information about what's wrong and an inducement to make things better. Sadness and loneliness and shame play similar roles.

What does it mean to live in what Fareed Zakaria calls a "post-American world"?' He summarizes the main idea of his book by that name in the first sentence: "This is a book not about the decline of America but rather about the rise of everyone else."2

How resilient people are. If one day you woke up to find that you had been transformed into a gigantic insect, the chances are you would just get up and carry on with your new life.

Resentment is trying to change something that is just what it is. When we can't change it, we resent it.

if you are talking with a direct person, present your ideas in a straightforward, logical manner, but if you are speaking with an indirect person, use a more feeling-oriented, participatory style. [...] when you find yourself having to tell other women what to do, your savviest choice is often to adopt their indirect style. That's not being manipulative or weak. That's being smart.

You know I used to think the future was solid or fixed, something you inherited like an old building that you move into when the previous generation moves out or gets chased out. But it's not. The future is not fixed, it's fluid.

moved to Richmond in Yorkshire and from

Optimism research teaches us that we should expect the best and have a contingency plan for the worst.

to prime yourself to act differently, the defaults you set up, the commitments you make, and the norms of those you surround yourself with, as well as using these elements to alter your habits.

Our experience using computers reflects a trade-off that was made fifty years ago or more.

It has been a long transition from interacting with computers using a soldering iron to interacting using a mouse. It has been neither smooth nor planned.

Introducing change is like pulling off a bandage : the pain is a memory as soon as you feel it.

One must love a cat on its own terms.

The certainty's is gone, as you say. But that's exactly what you just said distinguishes our age from theirs. We can't go back, or pretend we are back. We have to go on from where we are. In doubt.

The certainty's gone, as you say. But that's exactly what you just said distinguishes our age from theirs. We can't go back, or pretend we are back. We have to go on from where we are. In doubt.

For pantheists, evolution is a universal force that works even on nonliving things. From the very first instant of our universe, every individual thing has existed in the midst of other things, and has had to adapt to the community of beings in which it finds itself. Evolution is at work even in the realms of mind and of society. Ideas, scientific theories, technologies and products are tested against each other and the most effective survive.

People are naming it the Third Wave, the Information Age, etc. but I would say those are basically technological descriptions, and this next shift is not about technology - although obviously it will be influenced and in some cases expressed by technologies.