Adaptive Quotes

You have to be fast on your feet and adaptive or else a strategy is useless.

Charles de Gaulle

Change, Leadership, Gnarly

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At Adaptive Path, we've been doing our own work with Ajax over the last several months, and we're realizing we've only scratched the surface of the rich interaction and responsiveness that Ajax applications can provide.

Jesse James Garrett

Ajax, Lasts, Path

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We have the most flexible and adaptive economy. Making sure we sustain the ability of the American economy to perform well is really the priority of economic policy.

John W. Snow

Priorities, Economic, Economy

"Treasury Secretary Snow Optimistic on Economy". "PBS NewsHour" with Jim Lehrer, www.pbs.org. March 23, 2005.

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Living in an entirely different physical as well as biotic environment, such a population would have unique opportunities to enter new niches and to select novel adaptive pathways.

Ernst Mayr

Unique, Opportunity, Pathways

Ernst Mayr (1988). “Toward a New Philosophy of Biology: Observations of an Evolutionist”, Harvard University Press

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Most of the vices and mortal sins condemned today correspond to inclinations that were purely adaptive or at least harmless in primitive man

Konrad Lorenz

Men, Primitive Man, Vices

Konrad Lorenz (1966). “On aggressión”

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Play is a uniquely adaptive act, not subordinate to some other adaptive act, but with a special function of its own in human experience.

Johan Huizinga

Playing Games, Special, Function

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Effective use of Braille is as important to the blind as independent mobility, knowledge in the use of adaptive technology, and the core belief that equality, opportunity, and security are truly possible for all people who are blind.

Bob Ney

Independent, Technology, Opportunity

"U.S. House Passes Braille Commemorative Coin Bill". Bob Ney's remarks before the vote on H.R. 2872, nfb.org. February 28, 2006.

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If you look at body fat, it seems to increase with age, even though your weight does not. That's a physiological fact of aging, they say. Heck it is. It is an adaptive effect of aging.

Kenneth H. Cooper

Age, Doe, Looks

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What I try to do in the book is to trace the chain of relationships running from elementary particles, fundamental building blocks of matter everywhere in the universe, such as quarks, all the way to complex entities, and in particular complex adaptive system like jaguars.

Murray Gell-Mann

Running, Block, Book

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Theatre people, who are an adaptive species, know that to remain sane in the process of production where everyone and his uncle has an opinion about how to fix a show, you must pick the people whose knowledge and taste you trust and stick only to these few. The Tweetocracy is no place to look.

John Lahr

Uncles, People, Theatre

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I found out that if you are going to win games, you had better be ready to adapt.

Scotty Bowman

Sports, Hockey, Winning

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Organizations that empower folks further down the chain or try to get rid of the big hierarchal chains and allow decision making to happen on a more local level end up being more adaptive and resilient because there are more minds involved in the problem.

Steven Johnson

Organization, Empowering, Decision

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United decidedly is not an innovative, adaptive organization.

Adam Hartung

Organization, Innovation, Innovative

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A terrific, stimulating book...Ramalingam clearly and engagingly shows how the use of complex adaptive systems thinking can significantly strengthen and enhance the impacts and effectiveness of global foreign aid.

Jerry Sabloff

Book, Thinking, Impact

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And it has been the paleontologist- my own breed-who have been most responsible for letting ideas dominate reality: ...We paleontologist have said that the history of life supports that interpretation [gradual adaptive change], all the while knowing that it does not.

Niles Eldredge

Reality, Ideas, Knowing

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Human judgment is notoriously fallible and perhaps seldom more so than in facile decisions that a character has no adaptive significance because we do not know the use of it.

George Gaylord Simpson

Character, Science, Decision

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But complex animals had obtained their adaptive flexibility at some cost--they had traded one dependency for another. It was no longer necessary to change their bodies to adapt, because now their adaptation was behavior, socially determined. That behavior required learning. In a sense, among higher animals adaptive fitness was no longer transmitted to the next generation by DNA at all. It was now carried by teaching.

Michael Crichton

Teaching, Animal, Dna

Michael Crichton (1996). “The lost world”

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The Darwinian adaptive trait of our time is the ability to figure out when we are being lied to on television.

Dick Morris

Political, Television, Politics

Dick Morris (2007). “The New Prince: Machiavelli Updated for the Twenty-First Century”, p.32, St. Martin's Press

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That's the paradox: the only time most people feel alive is when they're suffering, when something overwhelms their ordinary, careful armour, and the naked child is flung out onto the world. That's why the things that are worst to undergo are best to remember. But when that child gets buried away under their adaptive and protective shells—he becomes one of the walking dead, a monster.

Ted Hughes

Children, People, Walking Dead

Ted Hughes, Christopher Reid (2008). “Letters of Ted Hughes”, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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Often,our immediate reaction to a sudden crisis help us save ourselves. Our response to gradual crises that creep up upon us, on the other hand,may be so adaptive as to ultimately lead to self-destruction.

Amish Tripathi

Self, Hands, May

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Economists have the correct insight that economics is a theory of choice, the key to the story is the variety of options and centralised political control limits the options. The best recipe is adaptive efficiency coping with novel uncertainty in a non-ergodic world, the maintenance of institutions which enable trial & error experiment to occur, and an effective means of eliminating unsuccessful solutions

Douglass North

Mean, Errors, Keys

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Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation.
Civilization, like intelligence, may serve well, serve adequately, or fail to serve its adaptive function. When civilization fails to serve, it must disintegrate unless it is acted upon by unifying internal or external forces.

Octavia Butler

Mean, Civilization, Intelligence

Octavia E. Butler (2017). “Earthseed: The Complete Series”, p.121, Open Road Media

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Human enhancement is now being driven by military imperatives, at least in the US, because civilian society is more conservative in its approach. It’s a missed opportunity for a society-wide push to understand and reduce our need to power the brain down for hours every day. Every hour we sleep is an hour we are not working, finding mates, or teaching our children; if sleep does not have a vital adaptive function to pay for its staggering opportunity cost, it could be ‘the greatest mistake the evolutionary process ever made’.

Jessa Gamble

Children, Military, Mistake

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As you begin to realize that every different type of music, everybody's individual music, has its own rhythm, life, language and heritage, you realize how life changes, and you learn how to be more open and adaptive to what is around us.

Yo-Yo Ma

Life Changing, Different, Heritage

"Exclusive Interview With Yo Yo Ma on the Spirituality of Music". Interview with Laurence Vittes, www.huffingtonpost.com. September 30, 2012.

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Unintended consequences get to the heart of why you never really understand an adaptive problem until you have solved it. Problems morph and "solutions" often point to deeper problems. In social life, as in nature, we are walking on a trampoline. Every inroad reconfigures the environment we tread on.

Richard Pascale

Learning, Heart, Knowledge

Richard T. Pascale, Jerry Sternin, Monique Sternin (2010). “The Power of Positive Deviance: How Unlikely Innovators Solve the World's Toughest Problems”, p.192, Harvard Business Press

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