Quotes About Adaptation

Civilizations, I believe, come to birth and proceed to grow by successfully responding to successive challenges. They break down and go to pieces if and when a challenge confronts them which they fail to meet.

Groups must balance the need to enforce norms with the need to adapt. If the group is unable to enforce social norms, then there will be too much cheating, and cooperation will break down. However, if the group is too rigid in its social norms, then it will fail to adapt to new circumstances.

I have a tip that can take five strokes off anyone's golf game: it's called an eraser.

that can take 5 strokes off anyone's golf game. It's called an eraser

I tended to be perfectly comfortable hitting shots from places where no other golfer ever wanted to be. It turned out to be an important lesson about the game: you've got to learn to live with trouble, and you've got to learn how to get out of it.

I felt that there were no magazines or books around in the Stone Age, and yet every schmuck took care of babies back then, so how wrong could you go? As long as you love the baby, you figure it out, just like with everything you love doing.

We have been god-like in the planned breeding of our domesticated plants, but rabbit-like in the unplanned breeding of ourselves.

In some ways England is more liberal than France, but I also find it more intrusive. But when you go abroad you have to accept the ways of where you live. I have to respect that.

Seen from this perspective, our unstable environment is the essential wellspring of human evolution and change, and the more serious our environmental problems become, the more creatively we are responding to the challenge.

However, as good or as bad as yesterday may have been, it is unchangeable. There is nothing I can do to bring it back.

Just as a good chief executive officer keeps looking for ways to change because he or she knows that nothing will be the same in five years, so you, too, as the chief executive officer of your own life, must always be looking for better ways to make changes. You must be flexible enough to get around the new obstacles that are looming on the horizon, and you must be willing to change course if you have to.

What I did was focus on what I had and no on what I didn't have. Through that focus, I was able to make more changes.

Things turn out best for the people who make the best out of the way things turn out.

Golf is a game in which the ball lies poorly and the players well.

The technology that threatens to kill off books as we know them - the 'physical book ' a new phrase in our language - is also making the physical book capable of being more beautiful than books have been since the middle ages.

It's not necessarily that we were wrong then and right now. It's just that our knowledge is constantly growing, and along the way we sometimes have to unlearn what we thought was true.

Believe me, most people resist change, even when it promises to be for the better. But change will come, and if you acknowledge this simple but indisputable fact of life, and understand that you must adjust to all change, then you will have a head start.

Imagine an external intelligence studying the methods by which earth-born creatures of various types adjust themselves to future circumstances. The most primitive method is, I suppose, no more than simple nervous reaction. The most developed method involves reasoned expectation. And between these two extremes our supposed observer would see a long series of intermediate forms melting into one another by insensible gradation.

Don't force it; get a bigger hammer.

Far from frustration and depression, he finished out his life as a happy father and reinvented himself as a teacher.

When he fell behind as an innovator, he reinvented himself as an instructor.

In his book, he interviews hundreds of people about their transitions, finding that a significant change in life occurs, on average, every eighteen months, and that lifequakes like his—or those that involve voluntary or involuntary career changes—happen very regularly. Most are involuntary—and thus unwelcome at the time—but nothing is more predictable than change.

As difficult as these are, the transitions in our private lives are harder.

If you're experiencing decline in fluid intelligence—and if you are my age, you are—it doesn't mean you are washed up. It means it is time to jump off the fluid intelligence curve and onto the crystallized intelligence curve.