Quotes About Adaptation

Social cooperation is our key for survival and reproduction.

Total annihilation has a way of sharpening people's minds.

Homo sapiens is just not built for satisfaction. Human happiness depends less on objective conditions and more on our own expectations. Expectations, however, tend to adapt to conditions, including to the condition of other people.

Religions that lose touch with the technological realities of the day lose their ability even to understand the questions being asked.

Successful cultures are those that excel in reproducing their memes, irrespective of the costs and benefits to their human hosts.

Ordinary people may not understand artificial intelligence and biotechnology, but they can sense that the future is passing them by.

Feelings are thus not the opposite of rationality - they embody evolutionary rationality.

By 2050, not only the idea of a job for life but even that of a profession for life might seem antediluvian.

Most mammals emerge from the womb like glazed earthenware emerging from a kiln – any attempt at remoulding will only scratch or break them. Humans emerge from the womb like molten glass from a furnace. They can be spun, stretched and shaped with a surprising degree of freedom.

Archaic humans paid for their large brains in two ways. Firstly, they spent more time in search of food. Secondly, their muscles atrophied. Like a government diverting money from defence to education, humans diverted energy from biceps to neurons. It's hardly a foregone conclusion that this is a good strategy for survival on the savannah. A chimpanzee can't win an argument with a Homo sapiens, but the ape can rip the man apart like a rag doll.

The ability to navigate is like a muscle—use it or lose it.

Feelings are therefore not the opposite of rationality—they embody evolutionary rationality.

other organisms are doing quite well. Rats and cockroaches, for example, are in their heyday. These tenacious creatures would probably creep out from beneath the smoking rubble of a nuclear Armageddon, ready and able to spread their DNA. Perhaps 65 million years from now, intelligent rats will look back gratefully on the decimation wrought by humankind, just as we today can thank that dinosaur-busting asteroid.

As bureaucracies accumulate power, they become immune to their own mistakes. Instead of changing their stories to fit reality, they can change reality to fit their stories. In

Consider a resident of Berlin, born in 1900 and living to the ripe age of one hundred. She spent her childhood in the Hohenzollern Empire of William II; her adult years in the Weimar Republic, the Nazi Third Reich and Communist East Germany; and she died a citizen of a democratic and reunified Germany. She had managed to be a part of five very different sociopolitical systems, though her DNA remained exactly the same.

Radical Islam is in a far worse position than socialism. It has not yet come to terms even with the Industrial Revolution

evolutionary pressures have adapted the human brain to store immense quantities of botanical, zoological, topographical and social information.

How do you live in an age of bewilderment, when the old stories have collapsed and no new story has yet emerged to replace them?

Knowledge that does not change behaviour is useless. But knowledge that changes behaviour quickly loses its relevance. The

The bitter truth is that the world has simply become too complicated for our hunter-gatherer brains.

Next time a mosquito buzzes in your ear, accuse her of unnatural behaviour. If she were well behaved and content with what God gave her, she'd use her wings only as solar panels. The

Studying history aims to loosen the grip of the past. It enables us to turn our head this way and that, and begin to notice possibilities that our ancestors could not imagine, or didn't want us to imagine.

Other animals at the top of the pyramid, such as lions and sharks, evolved into that position very gradually, over millions of years. This enabled the ecosystem to develop checks and balances that prevent lions and sharks from wreaking too much havoc. As lions became deadlier, so gazelles evolved to run faster, hyenas to cooperate better, and rhinoceroses to be more bad-tempered. In contrast, humankind ascended to the top so quickly that the ecosystem was not given time to adjust.

The more data we have and the better we understand history, the faster history alters its course, and the faster our knowledge becomes outdated.