Best 150 quotes in «adaptation quotes» category

Hugh Laurie (playing Mr. Palmer) felt the line 'Don't palm all your abuses [of language upon me]' was possibly too rude. 'It's in the book,' I said. He didn't hit me.

Human nature was structured through the eons. What our environment of persistent scarcity has done to us during all that time is undeniable; it has transformed a particular behavior that insures collective survival in situations of scarcity into our “default” or basic code of behavior in all situations.

Human vice is proof that biological adaption is, speaking literally, a thing of the past. Our minds are adapted to the small foraging bands in which our family spent ninety-nine percent of its existence, not the topsy-turvy contingencies we have created since the agricultural and industrial revolutions. [...] People do not divine what is adaptive for them or their genes; their genes give them thoughts and feelings that were adaptive in the environment in which the genes were selected.

I am suggesting here that organisms have a built-I capability of adapting to their environment. I am suggesting that to the extent that evolution occurs, it occurs at the level of the organism. This suggestion differs sharply from the thesis of the NDT, which holds that evolution occurs only at the level of the population. Organisms contain within themselves the information that enables them to develop a phenotype adaptive to a variety of environments. The adaptation can occur by a change in the genome through a genetic change triggered by the environment, or it can occur without any genetic change.

I consider myself fortunate that I spent three years working at 7,775 feet before spending five years working at 13,796 feet on the summit of Mauna Kea. I can only wonder how much more severe my long term very high altitude sickness could have been without the initial adaptation to the lower altitude.

...if an organised body is not in the situation and circumstances best adapted to its sustenance and propagation, then, in conceiving an indefinite variety among the individuals of that species, we must be assured, that, on the one hand, those which depart most from the best adapted constitution, will be the most liable to perish, while, on the other hand, those organised bodies, which most approach to the best constitution for the present circumstances, will be best adapted to continue, in preserving themselves and multiplying the individuals of their race.

If love is only like a disease, where when you learn the disease for you to able to kill it. I would learn how to love so that I can kill it when it comes.

I had begun to realise how much I'd adapted to Keith's needs and preferences. Just small stuff: what time we went to bed, which side I slept on, not cooking cauliflower. Allowances and adaptions anyone in a long-term relationship has to make, accumulating over time. But I wasn't in a relationship anymore. I wanted to know what of myself needed to be reclaimed.

If you accept the situation, you will find strength for strategic adaptation.

If you are living in the electrified wireless west, then you are living a very abnormal lifestyle that your genetics has no adaptation to.

If you don’t see the images on a screen because people block your view, it is easier to adjust your sitting position than to call for an adjustment of the screen! You need to change yourself!

If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you always got.

If you have traveled on a jet airplane, then you have had a high powered radiation exposure that you have no genetic adaptation to.

I have every expectation that cancer will become known as the disease of human evolution trying and failing to adapt to a significantly changed environment.

In a sense, the media is a moving Potemkin village of understanding, constantly adapting and reconstructing after-the-fact.

I look at the world and I see absurdity all around me. People do strange things constantly, to the point that, for the most part, we manage not to see it.

I'm always amazed at the human capacity to not make fundamental changes, but instead merely adapt. I see these pictures of people in Beijing and New Delhi, walking around with masks on, because you can't walk outside your house and breathe? If you can't breathe?…If that's not the cue to make a fundamental change, I don't know what is!

I need not adapt in certain ways. I am in fact but a visitor to this world, an ephemeral gasp within its long, tired history, and, before anything else, a follower of Christ. By this alone I have the power not to shuffle away from the Faith, the power to break loose from these marching-shackles of ongoing cultural and political pretense.

Innovators "view failure not as a fatal character flaw but as a learning experience.

It seems comfortable to sink down on a sofa in a corner, to look, to listen. Then it happens that two figures standing with their backs against the window appear against the branches of a spreading tree. With a shock of emotion one feels 'There are figures without features robed in beauty'. In the pause that follows while the ripples spread, the girl to whom one should be talking says to herself, 'He is old'. But she is wrong. It is not age; it is that a drop has fallen; another drop. Time has given the arrangement another shake. Out we creep from the arch of the currant leaves, out into a wider world. The true order of things – this is our perpetual illusion – is now apparent. Thus in a moment, in a drawing-room, our life adjusts itself to the majestic march of day across the sky.

In Paley's famous illustration, the adaptation of all the parts of the watch to the function, or purpose, of showing the time, is held to be evidence that the watch was specially contrived to that end; on the ground, that the only cause we know of, competent to produce such an effect as a watch which shall keep time, is a contriving intelligence adapting the means directly to that end. Suppose, however, that any one had been able to show that the watch had not been made directly by any person, but that it was the result of the modification of another watch which kept time but poorly; and that this again had proceeded from a structure which could hardly be called a watch at all—seeing that it had no figures on the dial and the hands were rudimentary; and that going back and back in time we came at last to a revolving barrel as the earliest traceable rudiment of the whole fabric. And imagine that it had been possible to show that all these changes had resulted, first, from a tendency of the structure to vary indefinitely; and secondly, from something in the surrounding world which helped all variations in the direction of an accurate time-keeper, and checked all those in other directions; then it is obvious that the force of Paley's argument would be gone. For it would be demonstrated that an apparatus thoroughly well adapted to a particular purpose might be the result of a method of trial and error worked by unintelligent agents, as well as of the direct application of the means appropriate to that end, by an intelligent agent. Now it appears to us that what we have here, for illustration's sake, supposed to be done with the watch, is exactly what the establishment of Darwin's Theory will do for the organic world. For the notion that every organism has been created as it is and launched straight at a purpose, Mr. Darwin substitutes the conception of something which may fairly be termed a method of trial and error. Organisms vary incessantly; of these variations the few meet with surrounding conditions which suit them and thrive; the many are unsuited and become extinguished.

In youth, it was a way I had, To do my best to please. And change, with every passing lad To suit his theories. But now I know the things I know And do the things I do, And if you do not like me so, To hell, my love, with you.

I think," he mumbled eventually, "I think that in order to solve the problem it is important to define it and to have some sense of what has caused it." Another empty phrase, thought Jean-Yves furiously; not only empty, but, as it happened, untrue. The causes were clearly part of general shifts in society that were beyond their powers to change. They had to adapt to this new business climate, that was all. And how could they adapt to it? This moron clearly hadn't the faintest idea.

in spite of the phenomenal growth of the Internet and mobile devices, I still believe television will continue to be an incredibly important medium for the Church. After all, over the last century, radio never killed movies, and TV never killed radio. Everything finds its level in the media universe.

It is not a failure to readjust my sails to fit the waters I find myself in.

[I]t wasn't so much the mistakes that people made but how flexible they were in their aftermath that made all the difference in how their lives turned out.

It's too late to be studying Hebrew; it's more important to understand even the slang of today.

Mass movements are a function of adaptation. Its pulse is change. A movement without mass is a cult. And it is in cults that stupid tyrants hold sway.

I was persisting in reading my present environment in the light of my old one.

Long term exposure to abnormally high levels of lightning may trigger genetic adaptation processes in the human.

Old English, the heart and soul of the old regime at Oxford, ceased to be a required course only as of 2002.

No amount of acclimatization to very high altitude will prevent long term health problems and genetic adaptation processes from developing in the sea level adapted human.

Nature isn't still. Nature is spinning at a thousand miles an hour, just like the rest of us. It's winds and floods and rain and quakes. A huge part of human history is about us just trying to survive the speed of nature.

One reason television is such a perilous medium is that even infants less than two years old imitate what they see on the screen, yet what appears there is determined by what happens to appeal or to sell rather than by what behavior helped individuals in a particular past environment to survive or prosper.

Only those who are able to adapt to changing scenarios will continue to survive and prosper. Success is directly proportional to the degree of positive adaptation to change.

People lie to adapt...

On the rare occasions on which a movie was shown, there was as much suspense in the audience over whether the electricity would hold out to the end of the film as there was in the film itself.

Our “selves”, our “being”, our “ego”, our “soul”, our individuality, our personality, … is only our mind continuously adapting to its environment to insure survival and well-being, working with whatever inherited predispositions (formed by previous generations of minds adapting to their environment) it has to work with. If we could only make our beautiful mind come in contact with the facts, ALL the facts… , we could trust it with the rest, ALL the rest. Our beautiful mind will always do the right thing. Always. The thing is to find the facts. ALL the facts. Not one less.

Overall, then, we will view cas [complex adaptive systems] as systems composed of interacting agents described in terms of rules. These agents adapt by changing their rules as experience accumulates. In cas, a major part of the environment of any given adaptive agent consists of other adaptive agents, so that a portion of any agent's efforts at adaptation is spent adapting to other adaptive agents. This one feature is a major source of the complex temporal patterns that cas generate. To understand cas we must understand these ever-changing patterns.

People see a Macbeth film. They imagine they have seen Macbeth, and don't want to see it again; so when your Mr. Hackett or somebody comes round to act the play, he finds the house empty. That is what has happened to dozens of good plays whose authors have allowed them to be filmed. It shall not happen to mine if I can help it.

The human has genetic adaptation to natural electromagnetic radiation. Increasing, reducing or removing the natural radiation exposures results in a sickened human that may progress onto a diseased state.

Take in every detail of your environment and adapt.

The four stages of mental illness: 1. Awareness. 2. Denial 3. Acceptance. 4. Adaptation.

The human has no genetic adaptation to modern industrialized products and needs to be careful with prolonged exposure to these for good health.

Q: Have you been released or are you still a Beta version? A: No official release of myself will ever follow! Q: Then, you are not! A: I

Spiritual love is when you see new faces as the oldest.

Suicide is a form of murder— premeditated murder. It isn’t something you do the first time you think of doing it. It takes some getting used to. And you need the means, the opportunity, the motive. A successful suicide demands good organization and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with the suicidal state of mind. It’s important to cultivate detachment. One way to do this is to practice imagining yourself dead, or in the process of dying. If there’s a window, you must imagine your body falling out the window. If there’s a knife, you must imagine the knife piercing your skin. If there’s a train coming, you must imagine your torso flattened under its wheels. These exercises are necessary to achieving the proper distance. The debate was wearing me out. Once you've posed that question, it won't go away. I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won't. Anything I thought or did was immediately drawn into the debate. Made a stupid remark—why not kill myself? Missed the bus—better put an end to it all. Even the good got in there. I liked that movie—maybe I shouldn’t kill myself. In reality, it was only part of myself I wanted to kill: the part that wanted to kill herself, that dragged me into the suicide debate and made every window, kitchen implement, and subway station a rehearsal for tragedy.

They did what soldiers always do. They improvised.

The mind is not designed to grasp the laws of probability, even though the laws rule the universe.

There were times he thought he might not want to live the life he saw before him. It was a life of obstacles and hardships—challenges and tests of will he could not yet predict. But he couldn’t stop. He had to endure. The path had not changed. It was he who had changed.