Quotes about Adaptation

Resolve to be a master of change rather than being the victim of change

Do what you can, with what you have, right where you are.

To achieve something that you have never achieved before, you must learn and practice qualities and skills that you have never had before.

To develop a quality that you lack, act as if you already had that quality in every situation where it is called for. In modern terms, however, we say, "Fake it until you make it".

You can get used to anything, I guess, if you've been there enough.

The secrets of evolution, are time and death. There's an unbroken thread that stretches from those first cells to us.

It is precisely our plasticity, our long childhood, that prevents a slavish adherence to genetically programmed behavior in human beings more than in any other species.

So far as I know, childbirth is generally painful in only one of the millions of species on Earth: human beings. This must be a consequence of the recent and continuing increase in cranial volume... Childbirth is painful because the evolution of the human skull has been spectacularly fast and recent.

The secrets of evolution are death and time—the deaths of enormous numbers of lifeforms that were imperfectly adapted to the environment; and time for a long succession of small mutations.

Our very existence in that distant time requires that we will have changed our institutions and ourselves.

But humans have deliberately selected which plants and animals shall live and which shall die for thousands of years. We are surrounded from babyhood by familiar farm and domestic animals, fruits and trees and vegetables. Where do they come from? Were they once free-living in the wild and then induced to adopt a less strenuous life on the farm? No, the truth is quite different. They are, most of them, made by us.

We are, each of us, largely responsible for what gets put into our brains, for what, as adults, we wind up caring for and knowing about. No longer at the mercy of the reptile brain, we can change ourselves.