Adaptive Quotes - Page 2

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

31 Copy quote
The realizations of anarchist ideas and practices are like sociopolitical ecosystems. Local versions resemble each other, but they are endlessly adaptive and everywhere different to meet their needs in their environments. Anarchism can be adapted to meet the culture, economics, ecology, and politics of various people or communities. That's the beauty of it.

Scott Crow

Practice, Ecosystems, Ideas

5 Copy quote
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

11 Copy quote
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

4 Copy quote
We suffered a terrible blow on 11 September 2001. We responded with fear and anger. A fight-or-flight response is adaptive in any species. For us, given our power, fight was the only response we could imagine.

Yochai Benkler

Fighting, Blow, September

"Manning and Snowden light path for the US to return to its better self" by Yochai Benkler, www.theguardian.com. July 26, 2013.

4 Copy quote

Show source
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

4 Copy quote
Darwin and his successors have railed against the fallacy of confusing the current utility of a trait with the reason the trait evolved. For example, Darwin argued that skull sutures in mammals did not evolve because they facilitate live birth; the sutures were in place well before live birth evolved. Checking the chronological order in which different traits evolved in a lineage is one way to test an adaptive hypothesis; the fact of common ancestry is what makes that checking possible.

Elliott Sober

Skulls, Order, Confusing

Source: www.3ammagazine.com

4 Copy quote

Show source
Our ability to adapt came from our East African birthplace, a meteorologically unstable place. If you couldn't adapt, you'd be dead. But once you've found a solution, there is no need to continue the adaptive behavioral parrying, which is bioenergetically very expensive to maintain. We are built to find answers, then hang on to them as long as we can.

John Medina

Long, East, Needs

Source: bobmorris.biz

10 Copy quote

Show source
For centuries the most powerful argument for God's existence from the physical world was the so-called argument from design: Living things are so beautiful and elegant and so apparently purposeful, they could only have been made by an intelligent designer. But [Charles] Darwin provided a simpler explanation. His way is a gradual, incremental improvement starting from very simple beginnings and working up step by tiny incremental step to more complexity, more elegance, more adaptive perfection.

Richard Dawkins

Beautiful, Powerful, Intelligent

Source: inters.org

14 Copy quote

Show source
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

22 Copy quote

Show source
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

12 Copy quote
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

49 Copy quote

Show source
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”

4 Copy quote

Show source
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

8 Copy quote
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.

80 Copy quote

Show source
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

12 Copy quote
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

20 Copy quote

Show source
Darwin repeatedly used the hypothesis of common ancestry as a platform on which to build his various ideas about testing hypotheses concerning natural selection. He also argued that adaptive similarities provide little or no evidence for common ancestry. Although this second claim needs to be fine-tuned, Darwin was right that ample evidence for common ancestry can exist even if none of the characteristics we observe were caused to evolve by natural selection.

Elliott Sober

Ideas, Littles, Ancestry

Source: www.3ammagazine.com

9 Copy quote

Show source
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

18 Copy quote
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

4 Copy quote
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

4 Copy quote

Show source
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

10 Copy quote
United decidedly is not an innovative, adaptive organization.

Adam Hartung

Organization, Innovation, Innovative

5 Copy quote
In the course of individual development, inherited characters appear, in general, earlier than adaptive ones, and the earlier a certain character appears in ontogeny, the further back must lie in time when it was acquired by its ancestors.

Ernst Haeckel

Lying, Character, Development

7 Copy quote
Childhood is a complex dialectical process characterized by periodicity, unevenness in the development of different functions, metamorphosis or qualitative transformation of one form into another, intertwining of external and internal factors, and adaptive processes which overcome impediments that the child encounters.

Lev S. Vygotsky

Children, Philosophy, Educational

164 Copy quote