Quotes About Adaptation

We have been told over and over that you can't change human nature, but the study of emic realities shows quite the contrary, that almost anything can become human nature if society defines it as such.

Stupidity is like bumping into a wall all the time. After a while you get tired of it and try to look the situation over and see if there's a doorway somewhere. I think most people eventually do look for the doorway and stop bumping into the wall

But once you have a belief system everything that comes in either gets ignored if it doesn't fit the belief system or get distorted enough so that it can fit into the belief system. You gotta be continually revising your map of the world.

In existential experienced life, we notice that we are making bets and choices all the time, and are responsible for being alert and aware enough to make them intelligently and to revise them when necessary. We cannot blame everything on The Real Universe, since it is only a model we have created to deal with experienced life. If the model is not good enough, we do not blame it but revise and improve it.

The New Fundamentalists are not as far separated from the Old Fundamentalists as they like to think they are.

Worse yet, scientific models, like people and cattle and insect species and mountains and all things known, have a lifespan. Mountains may survive geological eras, but scientific maps, like people and birds, have short lives. None has ever lasted more than a few hundred years, at present. To believe in any such mask with the fervor of Gross and Levitt contradicts all known facts of scientific history. Every theory they worship will someday get junked.

What is true of the group is true of the individual. While we all have our favorite circuit, and tend to see that circuit as "superior" to all the others, we can be pushed out of it by shocks or stresses, in which case we jump to another circuit.

One is reminded of a story about Mark Twain and his very fashionable and respectable New England wife, who once tried to cure him of his salty riverboat speech. Mrs. Twain noted every cuss word he used all week long and then woke him Sunday morning and read it all back to him. Twain listened calmly and commented, You have the words, my dear, but you haven't got the music yet.

Few of our ancestors were perfect ladies or gentlemen; the majority of them were not even mammals.

Any multi-cellular organism must, if it is to survive, contain a hard-wired bio-survival circuit, which very simply programs an either-or choice: GO FORWARD to the nourishing, the protective, or GO BACK, away from the threatening, the predatory.

In summary: the bio-survival circuit is DNA-programmed to seek a comfort-safety zone around a mothering organism. If a mother isn't present, the closest substitute in the environment will be imprinted. For the orphan giraffe, a four-wheeled jeep was chosen to stand in for the four-legged mother. The gosling who could not find the round, white body of the mother-goose fixated a round, white ping-pong ball.

The brain never remembers like a tape recorder or repeats like a parrot. Even the most rigid and compulsive types (Catholics, Marxists, members of CSICOP, etc.) do a lot more re-associating, re-framing and creative editing than they consciously realize.

Obviously, an ideally "balanced" person — that is, one not robotized and able to adjust to circumstances as they arise — would not be so off-centered. Such a person would be able to move a little bit into each quadrant "according to the times and seasons" as the Chinese say, but would basically maintain a centered detachment between all of them. She or he could be graphed as a circle:

There are a lot of different realities going around these days," Abbie Hoffman once said. Evolutionary acceleration is forcing us to the point where each will have to take responsibility for which reality we accept.

Where feeling is reaction, emotion is adaptation. So feeling is an instantaneous, nonreflective (there's no time for reflection!) arising, but emotion is all about how we handle that feeling.

Loss is the price we pay for progress," she said. "Only as we leave things behind do we move forward.

Thing about getting a place with a great view," Hawk said, "is, after you moved in and looked at the great view for a few days, you get used to it and it ain't a great view anymore. It just what you look at out your window.

Hawk could track a salmon to its spawning bed without getting wet. But

dark, difficult enough the human sphere, yet eyes grow sharp by use

The best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agley.

The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.

Generating a rapidly changing environment—that is, engaging in activity that is so quick it is disorienting and appears uncertain or ambiguous to the enemy—inhibits the adversary's ability to adapt and causes confusion and disorder that, in turn, causes an adversary to overreact or underreact. Boyd closed the briefing by saying the message is that whoever can handle the quickest rate of change is the one who survives.

She didn't want to look ahead to the days and the months and the years with him. Here, now, in this room, it was all right, but later? Again, time couldn't stop. And she saw at last that time only stopped when you were dead...Time was always moving and nothing could stay the same, everything was always changing, for better or for worse. And you had to change with time, with the seasons and the years, or you would be dead too, although your heart would continue to beat.

There is great audacity in the willingness to change, more than a little optimism, and a serious dose of courage. It