Quotes About Coevolution

Peter suspects that the caltrop is evolving in response to the finches. Where the struggle for existence is fierce, the caltrop that is likeliest to succeed is the plant that puts more energy into spines and less into seeds; but in the safer, more secluded spot, the fittest plants are the ones that put more energy into making seeds and less energy into protecting them. The finches may be driving the evolution of caltrop while caltrop is driving the evolution of the finches.

It has become evident that the primary lesson of the study of evolution is that all evolution is coevolution: every organism is evolving in tandem with the organisms around it.

The exchange between plants and people has shaped the evolutionary history of both. Farms, orchards, and vineyards are stocked with species we have domesticated. Our appetite for their fruits leads us to till, prune, irrigate, fertilize, and weed on their behalf. Perhaps they have domesticated us. Wild plants have changed to stand in well-behaved rows and wild humans have changed to settle alongside the fields and care for the plants—a kind of mutual taming.

Ever since then, all descendant vertebrates have had the forward end of the digestive system and the forward end of the respiratory system very much involved with each other. This manifests itself in the human body with a crossing of the two systems in the throat.

In the world of the Red Queen, any evolutionary progress will be relative as long as your foe is animate and depends heavily on you or suffers heavily if you thrive, like the seals and the bears. Thus the Red Queen will be especially hard at work among predators and their prey, parasites and their hosts, and males and females of the same species. Every creature on earth is in a Red Queen chess tournament with its parasites (or hosts), its predators (or prey), and, above all, with its mate.

The renowned biologist and thinker E. O. Wilson calls the study of gene-culture coevolution "one of the great unexplored domains of science.

Natural selection has designed flowers to communicate with other species, deploying an astonishing array of devices—visual, olfactory, and tactile—to get the attention of specific insects and birds and even certain mammals.

Our grammar might teach us to divide the world into active subjects and passive objects, but in a coevolutionary relationship every subject is also an object, every object a subject. That's why it makes just as much sense to think of agriculture as something the grasses did to people as a way to conquer the trees. •

By producing sugars and proteins to entice animals to disperse their seed, the angiosperms multiplied the world's supply of food energy, making possible the rise of large warm-blooded mammals. Without flowers, the reptiles, which had gotten along fine in a leafy, fruitless world, would probably still rule. Without flowers, we would not be.

In the Network Era—that age we have just entered—dense communication is creating artificial worlds ripe for emergent coevolution, spontaneous self-organization, and win-win cooperation. In this Era, openness wins, central control is lost, and stability is a state of perpetual almost-falling ensured by constant error.

Perhaps the most useful lesson of coevolution for "wannabe" gods is that in coevolutionary worlds control and secrecy are counterproductive.

Morality, by promoting cooperative behavior, can change the whole population biology of a species, and it seems to be an important product of gene-culture coevolution in human societies.

renowned biologist and thinker E. O. Wilson calls the study of gene-culture coevolution "one of the great unexplored domains of science.

The seeds of many wild plant species actually must pass through an animal's gut before they can germinate. For instance, one African melon species is so well adapted to being eaten by a hyena-like animal called the aardvark that most melons of that species grow on the latrine sites of aardvarks.

Nosotros y nuestros patógenos estamos encerrados ahora en una escalada de competición evolutiva, con la muerte de un contendiente como precio de la derrota y con la selección natural desempeñando el papel de árbitro.

Para alcanzar la armonía y la igualdad, tanto los hombres como las mujeres deben reconocer que están unidos en un proceso coevolutivo que comenzó hace mucho tiempo y que sigue operando en la actualidad a través de nuestras estrategias de emparejamiento.

The closest relatives of bed bugs (Cimex lectularius) are parasites of cave bats—which indicates that that was also bed bugs' original niche.