Quotes About Adaptation

Ask not what a gene does. Ask what it does in a particular environment and when expressed in a particular network of other genes

sometimes, it can be enormously stressful to construct a world without stressors.

In other words, the more genomically complex the organism, the larger the percentage of the genome devoted to gene regulation by the environment.

We don't passively forget that something is scary. We actively learn that it isn't anymore.

We have multiple dichotomies in our heads, and ones that seem inevitable and crucial can, under the right circumstances, have their importance evaporate in an instant.

evolution is about reproduction, passing on copies of genes.

Robert M. Sapolsky

Axonal remapping in blind or deaf individuals is great, exciting, and moving. It's cool that your hippocampus expands if you drive a London cab. Ditto about the size and specialization of the auditory cortex in the triangle player in the orchestra. But at the other end, it's disastrous that trauma enlarges the amygdala and atrophies the hippocampus, crippling those with PTSD. Similarly, expanding the amount of motor cortex devoted to finger dexterity is great in neurosurgeons but

And you'd better bet that changes along the lines of those presented in this chapter occurred in the brains of anyone transformed by these transformations. A different world makes for a different worldview, which means a different brain. And the more tangible and real the neurobiology underlying such change seems, the easier it is to imagine that it can happen again.

Como Sullivan e seus colegas escreveram, "o apego [de tal filhote] por quem cuida dele evoluiu para garantir que o filhote estabeleça uma ligação com o cuidador, independente da qualidade dos cuidados recebidos". Em uma tempestade, qualquer mãe serve.

Watson was pathologically caught inside a bucket having to do with the environmental influences on development. "I'll guarantee . . . to train him to become any type." Yet we are not all born the same, with the same potential, regardless of how we are trained.*

Before you came to live with us, our lives were as always, and we were happy. We worked, we ate, and then we slept. When you came we were glad, for you brought us many fine gifts. And every night, instead of going to sleep, we sat with you, drank coffee, and smoked your tobacco, and listened to your radio. But now you go, and we are sorry, for all of these things go with you. We now know pleasures to which we are unaccustomed, and we shall be unhappy.

He is capable of turning everything into anything--snow into skin, skin into blossoms, blossoms into sugar, sugar into powder, and powder back into little drifts of snow--for all that matters to him, apparently, is to make things into what they are not, which is doubtless proof that he cannot stand being anywhere for long, wherever he happens to be.

Ulrich] richtete sich auf den Trümmern seiner Kindheit nicht ohne Schwierigkeiten ein, doch auch mit ein wenig angenehmen Gefühls, das wie Nebel aus diesem Boden aufstieg.

the man you watched die yesterday doesn't exist today; he fell to yesterday's bullets and you've got today's bullets to deal with. Nevertheless, sometimes it got me to brooding.

History cannot give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better face the future.

The law is always too short and too tight for growing humankind. The best you can do is do something and then make up some law to fit and by the time that law gets on the books you would have done something different. Do

The law is always too short and too tight for growing humankind.

Measure after measure, it's the same. We aren't classically monogamous or polygamous. As everyone from poets to divorce attorneys can attest, we are by nature profoundly confused—mildly polygynous, floating somewhere in between.

It is virtually impossible to understand how biology works outside the context of environment.

Only fools expect everything to go the way they want. Expecting

You can't teach an old dog new tricks

Si descubres que estás atrapado en un agujero en la tierra... deja de cavar.

I just invent, then wait until man comes around to needing what I've invented.