Adaptive Quotes - Page 2

• Lobbyists know that a 0 percent tax rate on capital income is not, in fact, the lowest possible rate. There can be negative tax rates. There can be subsidies. There can be allowances for depreciation. Lobbyists are adaptive creatures.

  Joel Achenbach

  Subsidies, Facts, Lobbyists

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• A … difference between most system-building in the social sciences and systems of thought and classification of the natural sciences is to be seen in their evolution. In the natural sciences both theories and descriptive systems grow by adaptation to the increasing knowledge and experience of the scientists. In the social sciences, systems often issue fully formed from the mind of one man. Then they may be much discussed if they attract attention, but progressive adaptive modification as a result of the concerted efforts of great numbers of men is rare.

  Lawrence Joseph Henderson

  Knowledge, Men, Differences

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• It's not the strongest or the most intelligent who survive, but those most adaptive to change. Over the past 10 years, the need for, and focus on, adaptability has accelerated.

  Kenneth I. Chenault

  Intelligent, Past, Years

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• Until we become the architects of a society that is truly free and ecological, it will always seem that when the human brain is not adaptive, it is more often destructive than creative.

  Murray Bookchin

  Creative, Brain, Architect

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• Leadership is the ability to step outside the culture to start evolutionary change processes that are more adaptive.

  Edgar Schein

  Culture, Steps, Process

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• There is something uncannily adaptive about anti-Semitism: the way it can hide, unsuspected, in the most progressive minds.

  James Lasdun

  Mind, Way, Progressive

  James Lasdun (2013). “Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked”, p.196, Macmillan

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• The shift from the perception of the child as innocent to the perception of the child as competent has greatly increased the demands on contemporary children for maturity, for participating in competitive sports, for early academic achievement, and for protecting themselves against adults who might do them harm. While children might be able to cope with any one of those demands taken singly, taken together they often exceed children's adaptive capacity.

  David Elkind

  Sports, Children, Taken

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• It certainly would have been adaptive for ancestral man to have a chubby wife during stressful times of famine. Not only would she have had more calories to burn, and thus more energy and endurance, but since fat stores estrogen, she would have remained fertile for longer.

  Helen Fisher

  Men, Wife, Endurance

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• United decidedly is not an innovative, adaptive organization.

  Adam Hartung

  Organization, Innovation, Innovative

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• Exercising adaptive leadership is about giving meaning to your life beyond your own ambition.

  Ronald A. Heifetz

  Ambition, Exercise, Giving

  Ronald A. Heifetz, Marty Linsky, Alexander Grashow (2014). “Adaptive Leadership: The Heifetz Collection (3 Items)”, p.320, Harvard Business Review Press

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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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• 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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• The ruling quality of leaders adaptive capacity, is what allows true leaders to make the nimble decisions that bring success. Adaptive capacity is also what allows some people to transcend the setbacks and losses that come with age and to reinvent themselves again and again.

  Warren G

  Loss, People, Decision

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• Instead of constantly adapting to change, why not change to be adaptive?

  Fred Emery

  Change, Why Not, Adapting

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