Quotes About Adaptation

It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers.

When the world changes faster than species can adapt, many fall out. This is the case whether the agent drops from the sky in a fiery streak or drives to work in a Honda.

If we want everything to remain as it is, everything must change.

The Neanderthals lived in Europe for more than a hundred thousand years and during that period they had no more impact on their surroundings than any other large vertebrate. 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 wooly 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.

Modern humans arrived in Europe around forty thousand years ago, and again and again, the archaeological record shows, as soon as they made their way to a region where Neanderthals were living, the Neanderthals in that region disappeared.

Such is the economy of nature," he wrote, "that no instance can be produced of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct; of her having formed any link in her great work so weak as to be broken.

According to Lamarck, there was a force—the 'power of life'—that pushed organisms to become increasingly complex.

It was titled "Helping a Species Go Extinct.

Warming today is taking place at least ten times faster than it did at the end of the last glaciation, and at the end of all those glaciations that preceded it. To keep up, organisms will have to migrate, or otherwise adapt, at least ten times more quickly.

armadillos that, in some cases, grew to be as large as Fiat 500s.

At the heart of Darwin's theory

Their extended evolutionary history means that even groups of amphibians that, from a human perspective, seem to be fairly similar may, genetically speaking, be as different from one another as, say, bats are from horses.

On land, every animal larger than a cat seems to have died out.

The author David Quammen cautions that while it is easy to demonize the brown tree snake, the animal is not evil; it's just amoral and in the wrong place. What Boiga irregularis has done in Guam, he observes, "is precisely what Homo sapiens has done all over the planet: succeeded extravagantly at the expense of other species.

For the same reasons that local diversity has, as a general rule, been increasing, global diversity—the total number of different species that can be found worldwide—has dropped.

ICH BIN STOLZ, EIN NEANDERTHALER ZU SEIN

The Sixth Extinction will continue to determine the course of life long after everything people have written and painted and built has been ground into dust and giant rats have -or have not- inherited the earth.

THE SIXTH EXTINCTION

All they had to do was pick off a mammoth or a giant ground sloth every so often, when the opportunity arose, and keep this up for several centuries. This would have been enough to drive the populations of slow-reproducing species first into decline and then, eventually, all the way down to zero.

When a mass extinction occurs, it takes out the weak and also lays low the strong.

The history of life thus consists of 'long periods of boredom interrupted occasionally by panic.

and handjobs on crows.

if other institutions try to use it, they

What Boiga irregularis has done in Guam, he observes, "is precisely what Homo sapiens has done all over the planet: succeeded extravagantly at the expense of other species.