Quotes About Adaptation

Evolution is not stupid, and works much faster than most people realize.

Humans transform the world through our creative technologies, and we cannot survive without them.

As the developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik and her colleagues have observed, general intelligence, behavioral flexibility, ability to solve novel problems, and a reliance on learning from others tends to roughly correlate with an extended period of helpless immaturity.13 This relationship is found across a broad range of animals, including birds and mammals, suggesting that it tracks a fundamental evolutionary trade-off between narrow competence and creative flexibility.

Innovations are always necessarily gradual and incremental, building on the accumulated insights of past humans. We are the cultural animal par excellence, and our ability to share the products of our individual creativity and pass them on to future generations is the key to our ecological dominance.30

Our desire for alcohol is not an evolutionary mistake. There are good reasons for why we get drunk.

we are simply not well adapted, evolutionarily, to be able to consume alcohol safety outside of the traditional context of ritual and social controls.

They'd spent their lives not breaking laws, and till now they'd thought the rest of the world had been doing the same. But someone had changed the rules and forgotten to send them a telegram

I know it sounds like the end of the world, but worlds are ending every day and it's not always such a bad thing.

The study of man is the study of his extensions.

People carry around with them internalization's fixed-feature space learned early in life. Man is like other members of the animal kingdom , first, last and always a prisoner of his biological organism. No matter how hard he tries, it is impossible for him to the best himself of his own culture, where it has penetrated to the roots of his nervous system and determines how he perceives the world.

To increase density in a rat population and maintain healthy specimens, put them in boxes so they can't see each other, clean their cages, and give them enough to eat. You can pile the boxes up as many stories as you wish. Unfortunately, caged animals become stupid, which is a very heavy price to pay for a super filing system!

One of the characteristic problems of our time is how to close this gap between capabilities and foresight.

We see that, sometimes, as a result of these dislocations, as a result of people leaving their original intended career and going into something else where their creativity could make a difference, that depressions and all kinds of other unfortunate events can have a paradoxically stimulating effect on creativity.

You cannot make chicken salad out of Chicken shit.

I just know about sweat and frustration. And that what I once thought was impossible somehow doesn't always stay that way permanently. One day it's suddenly easy and accessible, and mostly because I've stopped struggling against it. I've just accepted where I am, keep showing up, and then the change just happens.

Very often people looking at my pictures say, 'You must have had to wait a long time to get that cloud just right (or that shadow, or the light).' As a matter of fact, I almost never wait, that is, unless I can see that the thing will be right in a few minutes. But if I must wait an hour for the shadow to move, or the light to change, or the cow to graze in the other direction, then I put up my camera and go on, knowing that I am likely to find three subjects just as good in the same hour.

The psyche adjusts to trauma in so many different ways, we just can't assume anything yet. But the resilience of the human spirit is a wondrous thing, truly limitless. Despair passes and anything can be born from it, anything at all. And Assaf is very young and he's strong inside, so we'll wait and watch and listen, and we'll see what we can do to help him regain his footing.

It's not easy to start over in a new place,' he said. 'Exile is not for everyone. Someone has to stay behind, to receive the letters and greet family members when they come back.

Who knows to-day from yesterday May learn to count no thing too strange: Love builds of what Time takes away, Till Death itself is less than Change.

One of the most extraordinary examples of adaptation to immaturity in contemporary American society today is how the word abusive has replaced the words nasty and objectionable.

It's not that we need new ideas, but we need to stop having old ideas.

Carefully laid plans will miscarry because the unexpected and even the unexpectable will happen.

Reasonable men adapt to the world around them unreasonable men make the world adapt to them. The world is changed by unreasonable men.

For all your years prepare, And meet them ever alike; When you are the anvil, bear-- When you are the hammer, strike.