Quotes About Adaptation

Politicians, like generals, have a tendency to fight the last war.

The human psyche, like human bones, is strongly inclined towards self-healing.

Our civilization has evolved through the continuous adjustment of society to the stimulus of new knowledge.

Space, time, and objects might just be aspects of a sensory desktop specific to Homo sapiens. They might not be deep insights into objective truths, just convenient conventions that have evolved to allow us to survive in our niche.

When we want things to stay the same, we'll always wind up playing catch-up. Better to go with the flow.

When you're facing in the wrong direction, progress means walking backward.

We are entering the Age of Awareness, marked by machine intelligence everywhere.

When change is easy, the need for it cannot be foreseen; when the need for change is apparent, change has become expensive, difficult, and time-consuming.

If a system is to deal successfully with the diversity of challenges its environment produces, then it needs to have a repertoire of responses (at least) as nuanced as the problems thrown up by the environment. So a viable system is one that can handle the variability of its environment. Or, as Ashby put it, only variety can absorb variety.

evolutionary psychologists have got it right. We are evolved beings and therefore our psychology will have to be understood in terms of natural selection, among other factors.

Filters fail when they know us too well and when they don't know us well enough.

Most educated people are aware that we are the outcome of nearly 4 billion years of Darwinian selection, but many tend to think that humans are somehow the culmination. Our sun, however, is less than halfway through its life span. It will not be humans who watch the sun's demise, 6 billion years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae.ad

Max Planck observed, revolutions in science sometimes have to wait for funerals.

There is no possible protection from technology except by technology," he wrote. "When you create a new environment with one phase of technology,

McLuhan, for one, was convinced that all efforts to preserve the old forms of author protection represent backward thinking and are doomed to failure

We know a lot nowadays about how to extrapolate from rats to people, but we don't only have to rely on that. In a sense we've made ourselves into experimental animals. There are too many of us, too crowded, in an environment we've poisoned with our own-uh-byproducts. Now when this happens to a wild species, or to rats in a lab, the next generation turns out weaker and slower and more timid. This is a defense mechanism.

Toffler's Law, I guess: the future arrives too soon and in the wrong order.

We fret about how to keep going the same old way when we should be casting around for another way that's better.

The Creator, if He exists, has a special preference for beetles.

If we take science as our sole guide, if we accept and hold fast that alone which is verifiable, the old theology must go.

One is tempted to say that the most human plants, after all, are the weeds.

The greatest enemy of a good plan is the dream of a perfect plan." Stick to the good plan.

It is dangerous ... to apply to the future inductive arguments based on past experience.

True consistency, that of the prudent and the wise, is to act in conformity with circumstances and not to act always the same way under a change of circumstances.