Quotes About Adaptation

Since long intestines and large brains are both massive energy consumers, it's hard to have both. By shortening the intestines and decreasing their energy consumption, cooking inadvertently opened the way to the jumbo brains of Neanderthals and Sapiens.

When a Sapiens band first entered a valley inhabited by Neanderthals, the following years might have witnessed a breathtaking historical drama.

In order to keep up with the world of 2050, you will need not merely to invent new ideas and products - you will above all need to reinvent yourself again and again.

Unfortunately, what was good for survival and reproduction in the African savannah a million years ago does not necessarily make for responsible behaviour on twenty-first-century motorways

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la misma manera que una compañía sin dinero está en bancarrota. Si una especie puede alardear de muchas copias de ADN, es un éxito, y la especie prospera. Desde esta perspectiva, 1.000 copias siempre son mejores que 100 copias. Esta es la esencia de la revolución agrícola: la capacidad de mantener más gente viva en peores condiciones.

In] the twenty-first century, you can hardly afford stability. If you try to hold on to some stable identity, job or world view, you risk being left behind as the world flies by you with a whooooosh. Given that life expectancy is likely to increase, you might subsequently have to spend many decades as a clueless fossil. To stay relevant - not just economically, but above all socially - you will need the ability to constantly learn and to reinvent yourself, certainly at a young age like fifty.

If some politicians don't understand these questions, or if they constantly talk about the past without being able to formulate a meaningful vision for the future, don't vote for them.

Thirdly, mass extinctions akin to the archetypal Australian decimation occurred again and again in the ensuing millennia – whenever people settled another part of the Outer World.

Since long intestines and large brains are both massive energy consumers, it's hard to have both. By shortening the intestines and decreasing their energy consumption, cooking inadvertently opened the way to the jumbo brains of Neanderthals and Sapiens.1

In 2010 only 2 per cent of Americans worked in agriculture and 20 per cent worked in industry, while 78 per cent worked as teachers, doctors, webpage designers and so forth. When mindless algorithms are able to teach, diagnose and design better than humans, what will we do?

Whereas social and political systems previously endured for centuries, today every generation destroys the old world and builds a new one in its place.

SEVENTY THOUSAND YEARS AGO, HOMO sapiens was still an insignificant animal minding its own business in a corner of Africa. In the following millennia it transformed itself into the master of the entire planet and the terror of the ecosystem.

La maggior parte dei mammiferi escono dal grembo come la terracotta smaltata esce dal forno – ogni tentativo di rimodellarla manderebbe tutto in frantumi. Gli umani escono dal grembo come la pasta di vetro dalla fornace. Possono essere rigirati, stirati e modellati con un sorprendente grado di libertà.

Millions of years of evolution have designed us to live and think as community members. Within a mere two centuries we have become alienated individuals. Nothing testifies better to the awesome power of culture.

The more we know, the less we can predict

La búsqueda de la humanidad de una vida más fácil liberó inmensas fuerzas de cambio que transformaron el mundo de maneras

Happiness and misery play a role in evolution only to the extent that they encourage or discourage survival and reproduction. Perhaps it's not surprising, then, that evolution has molded us to be neither too miserable nor too happy. It enables us to enjoy a momentary rush of pleasant sensations, but these never last for ever. Sooner or later they subside and give place to unpleasant sensations.

modernity needs to work hard to ensure that neither human individuals nor the human collective will try to retire from the race, despite all the tension and chaos it creates.

It didn't disturb the Sumerians that their script was ill-suited for writing poetry. They didn't invent it in order to copy spoken language, but rather to do things that spoken language failed at.

The big beasts of Africa and Asia learned to avoid humans, so when the new mega-predator – Homo sapiens – appeared on the Afro-Asian scene, the large animals already knew to keep their distance from creatures that looked like it. In contrast, the Australian giants had no time to learn to run away. Humans don't come across as particularly dangerous.

De repente damos muestra de un interés sin precedentes por la suerte de las llamadas formas de vida inferiores, quizá porque estamos a punto de convertirnos en una de ellas.

The bats live in a world of echoes. Just as in the human world every object has a characteristic shape and colour, so in the bat world every object has its echo-pattern. A bat can tell the difference between a tasty moth species and a poisonous moth species by the different echoes returning from their slender wings.

At the time of the Cognitive Revolution, the planet was home to about 200 genera of large terrestrial mammals weighing over fifty kilograms. At the time of the Agricultural Revolution, only about a hundred remained. Homo sapiens drove to extinction about half of the planet's big beasts long before humans invented the wheel, writing or iron tools. This