Quotes About Adaptation

Wood storks cool off by defecating on their own legs. (In

Eubaculites carinatus indicated that the group had exhausted its practical possibilities and entered some sort of decadent, Lady Gaga-ish phase.)

Here I was, trying to finish a book about the world spinning out of control, only to find the world spinning so far out of control that I couldn't finish the book.

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. A tiny set of genetic variations divides us from the Neanderthals, but that has made all the difference.

it revealed how people process disruptive information. Their first impulse is to force it into a familiar framework:

if there's been epidemic extinction and ecospace opens up, rats may be best placed to take advantage of that.

In one of the most often-quoted passages of On the Origin of Species, Darwin wrote: 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. Natural

His interest, after all, was not in the origin of species but in their demise.

The modern humans "replaced" the archaic humans, which is a nice way of saying they drove them to extinction.

Somewhere in our DNA must lie the key mutation (or, more probably, mutations) that set us apart—the mutations that make us the sort of creature that could wipe out its nearest relative, then dig up its bones and reassemble its genome.

One of the defining features of the Anthropocene is that the world is changing in ways that compel species to move, and another is that it's changing in ways that create barriers—roads, clear-cuts, cities—that prevent them from doing so.

A world without change," he said, "is a world without hope

HOW STRANGE THAT THE NATURE OF LIFE is change, yet the nature of human beings is to resist change. And how ironic that the difficult times we fear might ruin us are the very ones that can break us open and help us blossom into who we were meant to be. This

Let's put aside the goal of doing it perfectly, and replace it with the trust that we can do it differently.

Ch-ch-Changes, turn and face the strain, because I am trying to do just that.

Twice-Born people use the difficult changes in their outer lives to make the harder changes within.

If I can approach change with an understanding of the process and an openness to the pain, then my daily labors will be swift and fruitful.

Some of us don't. Some of us add up all of the smaller changes into one big lesson, and find our way home as well. A

We had lived in savannah for a million years. During that time the world got warm again and wetter, and some of the rain forest returned. But for us it was too late. By then we knew how to live only on the savannah. We could still climb trees, but we did not go back.

joined them later understood the arrangement, and fitted

She had a lot of practice standing things because she had to stand them, which was a hard habit to break.

Consistently stick to your plan, and over the next few months you will see your baby's sleep stabilize into a very comfortable pattern that is less and less affected by daily disruptions.

You can't go back to how things were. How you thought they were. All you really have... is now

the thing is you can get used to anything you think you cant you want to die but you dont you cant you just are