Quotes About Adaptation

Just for fun, have a look at Miami. The nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists calculates that by 2060, a staggering 58.5% of Miami's inhabitable land will be underwater. By 2100, it'll be more like 94%. Miami is going away.

For example, if you click Washington, DC, you learn that by 2080 it will feel like today's Greenwood, Mississippi, which is 9.8° hotter and 75% wetter than today's DC. And if you click Jacksonville, Florida, you discover that it will feel like the southern tip of Mexico—practically Belize.

Vast areas of old forest have been cut, or chained down with bulldozers, to make way for cattle ranching and urban sprawl. People have planted orchards, established urban parks, landscaped their yards with blossoming trees, and created other unintended enticements amid the cities and suburbs. 'So bats have decided that, as their native habitat is disappearing, as climate is becoming more variable, and their food source is becoming less diverse, it's easier to live in an urban area.

In some zoonotic pathogens, efficient transmissibility among humans seems to be inherent from the start, a sort of accidental preadaptedness for spreading through the human population, despite a long history of residence within some other host. SARS-CoV had it, from the earliest days of its 2002–2003 emergence in Guangdong and Hong Kong. SARS-CoV has it, no matter where or why SARS-CoV may be hiding since then.

The result will be gradual transmutation of heritable forms, and adaptation to circumstances, by a process of selective culling. Eventually he gave the crank a name: natural selection. Twenty years passed after the E notebook entry. The world heard nothing about natural selection.

A parasitic microbe, thus jostled, evicted, deprived of its habitual host, has two options—to find a new host, a new kind of host . . . or to go extinct.

This elaborate concatenation of life-forms and sequential strategies is highly adaptive and, so far as mosquitoes and hosts are concerned, difficult to resist. It shows evolution's power, over great lengths of time, to produce structures, tactics, and transformations of majestic intricacy. Alternatively, anyone who favors Intelligent Design in lieu of evolution might pause to wonder why God devoted so much of His intelligence to designing malarial parasites.

If you look at the world from the point of view of a hungry virus," the historian William H. McNeill has noted, "or even a bacterium—we offer a magnificent feeding ground with all our billions of human bodies, where, in the very recent past, there were only half as many people. In some 25 or 27 years, we have doubled in number. A marvelous target for any organism that can adapt itself to invading us.

In other words, HIV hasn't happened to humanity just once. It has happened at least a dozen times—a dozen that we know of, and probably many more times in earlier history.

The stability of species represented the bedrock of natural history.

We all make our deals with life. We do it invisibly, sometimes unconsciously, and alone, without benefit of collective bargaining, We come to terms.

The basic point is so important I'll repeat it: RNA viruses mutate profligately.

And like all forms of ecological equilibrium, it's temporary, provisional, contingent.

What makes a species of insect—or of mammal, or of microbe—capable of the outbreak phenomenon? That's a complicated question that the experts are still trying to answer.

sheets, carefully taped together, forming a triptych

Why Big Fierce Animals Are Rare.

A parasitic microbe, thus jostled, evicted, deprived of its habitual host, has two options—to find a new host, a new kind of host . . . or to go extinct. I

Vivimos en un planeta complicado, rico en organismos de una vasta variedad, incluyendo los virus, todos interactuando de forma oportunista, y aunque existen 7.000 millones de personas, el lugar no se ha hecho a nuestra conveniencia y para nuestro placer.

Cualquiera que defienda el diseño inteligente en lugar de la evolución debería pararse a pensar en por qué Dios habría dedicado tal parte de Su inteligencia a diseñar los parásitos de la malaria.

But here's a bit of spoilsport historical reality: It wasn't the finches that inspired Darwin, it was the Mockingbirds.

Ecological circumstance provides opportunity for spillover. Evolution seizes opportunity, explores possibilities, and helps convert spillovers to pandemics.

To become a different kind of person is to experience the world in a different way. When your mind changes, the world changes. And when we respond differently to the world, the world responds differently to us.

Lessons in life are context specific. Contexts are never the same. If there are no lessons you can use does that mean there are actually no lessons

Getting stuck on the past will weigh you down and looking into the future will only create worries.