Quotes About Adaptation

differently?" "I cannot go back and choose again," he replied. "So I don't ask myself what I could have done. I ask myself how I can live with it today.

Maybe we all change over time.

The focus of the conversation varies, largely because higher education today is astonishingly diverse.

La vejez tendría que ser la recompensa de una vida de mucho trabajo, pero no será más que un castigo si insistimos en seguir haciendo lo mismo de siempre, midiendo los logros del presente por el baremo de los del pasado y quedándonos cortos sin remedio.

Sureness is something like a neck brace, which we clamp around our lives, hoping to somehow protect ourselves from the frightening, constant whiplash of change. Sadly, the brace doesn't always hold.

Hard labor and the passing of the years had contorted and hardened his limbs to queer, crooked shapes, but he gave no impression of deformity, as Nat did. So of the earth was he that he looked more like a tree than a man, one of those tough old pine trees that nothing in the way of weather except a thunderbolt will ever get the better of.

Take all the fullness out of this skirt," they say. "Ok," we say, "but you'll feel awfully silly in it next year." "What do I care about next year?" they answer. "Any dress which isn't in style for at least three years isn't any good to begin with," we say.

The mistakes don't matter," he informed her one night after she stumbled over a station ID and apologized on air. "It's the recovery that counts." If she had a nickel for every one of his smiles, she'd have ten cents. She nodded sheepishly, preferring Harry's way of phrasing the same point. "I learned that a mistake is just something you go on from." Harry's advice gave her a route to follow, a path forward. Somehow Eddy managed to exchange one form of stress for another.

You head back outside, leaving the door unlocked. Better get used to it, you tell yourself. One of the dogs barks as you walk across the yard towards the main house. It's an excellent warning, of course. You knock on the front door. 'You don't need to knock,' she says, opening the door. 'You can come straight in.

specifically instructed, moving from one model that

Ich habe festgestellt, dass es gefährlich ist, sich an Dinge zu gewöhnen.' 'Gilt das für alles?' 'Ja, für alles. Man nimmt, was immer es ist, einfach nicht mehr wahr, und, schlimmer noch, man hat die Illusion, etwas geschafft zu haben.

Quanto impariamo dagli errori? Dipende da quanto siamo disposti ad imparare.

I want today to give up being so smugly sure about what tomorrow won't need.

Of the many species that have existed on earth--estimates run as high as fifty billion--more than ninety-nine per cent have disappeared. In the light of this, it is sometimes joked that all of life today amounts to little more than a rounding error. more than a rounding error.

The strongest argument for gene editing cane toads, house mice, and ship rats is also the simplest: what's the alternative? Rejecting such technologies as unnatural isn't going to bring nature back. The choice is not between what is and what was, but between what is and what will be, which, often enough, is nothing.

Pissing in your pants will only keep you warm for so long.

Everything (and everyone) alive today is descended from an organism that somehow survived the impact. But it does not follow from this that they (or we) are any better adapted. In times of extreme stress, the whole concept of fitness, at least in a Darwinian sense, loses its meaning: how could a creature be adapted, either well or ill, for conditions it has never before encountered in its entire evolutionary history?

Only in a place where the rules of the game remain fixed is there time for butterflies to evolve to feed on the shit of birds that evolved to follow ants.

The way corals change the world—with huge construction projects spanning multiple generations—might be likened to the way that humans do, with this crucial difference. Instead of displacing other creatures, corals support them.

Since the 1930s, Louisiana has shrunk by more than two thousand square miles.

There is every reason to believe that if humans had not arrived on the scene, the Neanderthals would be there still, along with the wild horses and the woolly rhinos. With the capacity to represent the world in signs and symbols comes the capacity to change it, which, as it happens, is also the capacity to destroy it.

The whole new layer on top of what I was thinking about in the nineteen-seventies is climate change," Lovejoy told me. He has written that "in the face of climatic change, even natural climatic change, human activity has created an obstacle course for the dispersal of biodiversity," the result of which could be "one of the greatest biotic crises of all time.

The choice is not between what is and what was, but between what is and what will be, which, often enough, is nothing.

Atmospheric warming, ocean warming, ocean acidification, sea-level rise, deglaciation, desertification, eutrophication—these are just some of the by-products of our species's success. Such is the pace of what is blandly labeled "global change" that there are only a handful of comparable examples in earth's history, the most recent being the asteroid impact that ended the reign of the dinosaurs, sixty-six million years ago.