Quotes About Adaptation

If you're not adapting to the very rapidly changing environment, if you can't think creatively, you lose big in this society because there are very few jobs for you left.

A historic measure of Paris's urbanity has been the description by Parisians of large rats on its subway system, or metro. I recently visited Paris with an eye toward seeing large rats. When I did not, after spending several hours being watched on metro platforms by wary Parisians, I began to realize that being able to readily spot rats in a specific city is an acquired skill, akin to learning a local dialect.

When the dinosaurs fell at the end of the Cretaceous, they were not a senile, moribund group that had played out its evolutionary options. Rather they were vigorous, still diversifying into new orders and producing a variety of big-brained carnivores with the highest grade of intelligence yet present on land.

I'd rather welcome change than cling to the past.

The psychotic patient has beliefs that require little information to confirm them and are indeed very difficult to refute logically. They are appropriate only in the sense that they once did apply to the parents' behavior. These misconceptions cause overdramatic and totally inappropriate responses to present-day circumstances and interfere with an individual's ability to adapt. In

If you do a single thing—and especially if there is a lot of money in that single thing—you should put a 'Welcome, Robots!' doormat outside your office," wrote technology expert Farhad Manjoo in Slate. "They're coming for you.

I hate the goddamn system, but until someone comes along with some changes that make sense, I'll stick with it. —Clint Eastwood as "Dirty Harry," Magnum Force, 1973

Automation does not simply supplant human activity but rather changes it, often in ways unintended and unanticipated by the designers. —Automation experts Raja Parasuraman and Dietrich Manzey, 2010

broken" or simply as "bad people," using their adult-life sexual acting out as proof of how unlovable they really are. They simply don't understand that their upbringing was lacking and left them without a positive sense of self or needed life skills, and that their problematic sexual behaviors are an adaptive response to what they experienced.

feelings are "false" or perhaps "illusory" if they lead the organism astray—

It is the study of how the human brain was designed—by natural selection—to mislead us, even enslave us.

Natural selection is an inanimate process, devoid of consciousness, yet is a tireless refiner, an ingenious craftsman.

Our entire notion of good and bad, our whole landscape of feelings—fear, lust, love, and the many other feelings, salient and subtle, that inform our everyday thoughts and perceptions—are products of the particular evolutionary history of our species.

Dalai Lama has said, "Don't try to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a better Buddhist; use it to be a better whatever-you-already-are.

Natural selection cannot directly 'see' an individual organism in a specific situation and cause behavior to be adaptively tailored.

emotions are just evolution's executioners.

As a rule, two extremely different alternative traits will not both be preserved by natural selection. One or the other is usually at least slightly more conducive to genetic proliferation. However marginal its edge, it should win out, given enough time.

natural selection doesn't even care about our short-term happiness.

Religion is a feature of cultural evolution that, among other things, addresses anxieties created by cultural evolution; it helps keep social change safe from itself.

Todos los organismos, incluidos los seres humanos, han sido diseñados por la selección natural para reaccionar a su entorno en modos que conduzcan a una «mejora» (según los criterios de la propia selección natural) de las cosas, lo cual significa que, en mayor o menor medida, casi siempre estamos escudriñando el horizonte en busca de cosas que nos hagan infelices, que nos incomoden o que no nos satisfagan

Don't try to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a better Buddhist; use it to be a better whatever-you-already-are.

from natural selection's point of view, feelings would make great labels for thoughts, labels that say things like "high priority," "medium priority," "low priority.

Darwin once summed up natural selection in ten words: "[M]ultiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.

Natural selection doesn't "want" us to be happy, after all; it just "wants" us to be productive, in its narrow sense of productive. And the way to make us productive is to make the anticipation of pleasure very strong but the pleasure itself not very long-lasting.