Quotes About Adaptation

I mean, nothing's really changed, but we've changed.

Yes, I said to myself, there are things I will never be able to do again. I don't like that and may even hate it, but that doesn't change the way things are. The sooner I make peace with that fact and accept the way things are, the sooner I'll be able to live in peace and enjoy my new normalcy.

Some things happen to us from which we never recover, and they disrupt the normalcy of our lives. That's how life is. Human nature has a tendency to try to reconstruct old ways and pick up where we left off. If we're wise, we won't continue to go back to the way things were (we can't anyway). We must instead forget the old standard and accept a 'new normal.

You must change your actions to change your results.

Whenever the long poles supporting their homes began to rot, they simply moved to a new location and built new homes.

Most people create their first Selves to deal with a bad situation, the death of a parent, the loss of a home, or the loss of their first boyfriend or girlfriend. These Selves aren't usually very well made, but they are the forces that awaken us to the need to create ourselves out of the materials of our life.

You live in El Paso, you're a pocho, an Americanized Mexican, and no one can tell Pablo that it doesn't change you. You shop in malls instead of mercados, you watch football instead of fútbol, you become another consumer in a giant machine that consumes consumers.

The old dictum is that "no plan survives first contact with the enemy," and the special-ops team is already regrouping and improvising a new plan. He hears the sharp, disciplined fire

Fail often, fail fast

We must design for the way people behave, not for how we would wish them to behave.

It is easy to design devices that work well when everything goes as planned. The hard and necessary part of design is to make things work well even when things do not go as planned.

One way of overcoming the fear of the new is to make it look like the old.

You must change the people you are speaking to so that you appear, to yourself, to be still alive.

They use all of the music that I did in the '50s, '60s and the '70s behind people like Tupac and LL Cool J. I'm into all that stuff.

The renowned Russian geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky once remarked, "All species are unique,

Should further discoveries bear this out, the robust australopithecines will stand as a rare example of parallel evolution, in which members of two descendant lineages of A. afarensis independently evolved similar adaptations, presumably in response to environmental change.

Incidentally because the gastrointestinal track is metabolically greedy any reduction in its size would have freed up energy for other demands, such as those of a bigger brain.

What is a weed? I have heard it said that there are sixty definitions. For me, a weed is a plant out of place.

Exaptation, in which a trait evolved for one function can co-opt a new function, is commonplace in nature. We use sex to procreate, but also to bond, play, heal, and enjoy pleasure.

Steven Pinker sums up the argument well: "We are organisms, not angels, and our minds are organs, not pipelines to the truth. Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness."36

In the last 20,000 years, our brains have shrunk 10 percent—from 1,500 cubic centimeters down to 1,350—a loss of the volume of a tennis ball.

This broader notion of fitness is called "inclusive fitness" to distinguish it from the notion of "personal fitness," which we have discussed until now.50 The two notions are not at odds. Inclusive fitness simply recognizes a broader spectrum of strategies by which genes muscle into the next generation.

Steven Pinker sums up the argument well: "We are organisms, not angels, and our minds are organs, not pipelines to the truth. Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness.

Perception may seem effortless, but in fact it requires considerable energy. Each precious calorie you burn on perception is a calorie you must find and take from its owner—perhaps a potato or an irate wildebeest. Calories can be difficult and dangerous to procure, so evolution has shaped our senses to be misers.