Adaptation Quotes - Page 6

• Adaptation can efficiently reduce the costs of climate change while atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases are being stabilised

  Nicholas Stern

  Climate, Cost, Concentration

  Nicholas Stern, Great Britain. Treasury (2007). “The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review”, p.346, Cambridge University Press

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• In many ways, constancy is an illusion. After all, our ancestors were immigrants, many of them moving on every few years; today we are migrants in time. Unless teachers can hold up a model of lifelong learning and adaptation, graduates are likely to find themselves trapped into obsolescence as the world changes around them. Of any stopping place in life, it is good to ask whether it will be a good place from which to go on as well as a good place to remain.

  Mary Catherine Bateson

  Life, Teacher, Moving

  Mary Catherine Bateson (2001). “Composing a Life”, p.14, Grove Press

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• The system functioned relatively automatically, and the prevailing system of racial meanings, identities, and ideologies already seemed natural. Ninety percent of those admitted to prison for drug offenses in many states were Black or Latino, yet the mass incarceration of communities of color was explained in race-neutral terms, an adaptation to the needs and demands of the current political climate.

  Michelle Alexander

  Race, Color, Racism

  Michelle Alexander (2013). “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness”, p.58, The New Press

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• But could not our situation be compared to one of a menacing epidemic? People are unable to view this situation in its true light, for their eyes are blinded by passion. General fear and anxiety create hatred and aggressiveness. The adaptation to warlike aims and activities has corrupted the mentality of man; as a result, intelligent, objective and humane thinking has hardly any effect and is even suspected and persecuted as unpatriotic.

  Albert Einstein

  Passion, Eye, Intelligent

  Albert Einstein (2016). “The Albert Einstein Collection: Essays in Humanism, The Theory of Relativity, and The World As I See It”, p.56, Open Road Media

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• To begin... To begin... How to start? I'm hungry. I should get coffee. Coffee would help me think. Maybe I should write something first, then reward myself with coffee. Coffee and a muffin. Okay, so I need to establish the themes. Maybe a banana-nut. That's a good muffin.

  Nicolas Cage

  Coffee, Writing, Thinking

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• We are all animals of this planet. We are all creatures. And nonhuman animals experience pain sensations just like we do. They too are strong, intelligent, industrious, mobile, and evolutional. They too are capable of growth and adaptation. Like us, firsthand foremost, they are earthlings. And like us, they are surviving. Like us they also seek their own comfort rather than discomfort. And like us they express degrees of emotion. In short like us, they are alive.

  Joaquin Phoenix

  Strong, Pain, Animal

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• The strain of constant adaptation to so many fearful events and discoveries is already too much to bear with sanity; one has to keep pretending to slip successfully into the new mould; a time will come when the tailored and camouflaged mind breaks beneath the burden; the stick insect in our brains no longer cares to resemble a twig on the same habitual human tree in the mere hope that it may survive extinction.

  Janet Frame

  Discovery, Tree, Brain

  Janet Frame (2010). “Towards Another Summer”, p.105, Counterpoint Press

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• When environments change, they usually do so pretty rapidly, at rates with which adaptation by natural selection would be hard put to keep up. When such change occurs, the quality of your adaptation to your old habitat is irrelevant, and any competitive advantage you might have had may be eliminated at a stroke.

  Ian Tattersall

  Quality, Would Be, Habitat

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• The human brain is generally regarded as a complex web of adaptations built into the nervous system, even though no one knows how.

  Michael Gazzaniga

  Brain, Nervous, Humans

  Michael S. Gazzaniga (2000). “The Mind's Past”, p.13, Univ of California Press

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• Life: a constellation of vital phenomena—organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.

  Anthony Marra

  Organization, Growth, Movement

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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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• Some evolutionists will protest that we are caricaturing their view of adaptation. After all, do they not admit genetic drift, allometry, and a variety of reasons for nonadaptive evolution?

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Views, Evolution, Reason

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• It is an error to imagine that evolution signifies a constant tendency to increased perfection. That process undoubtedly involves a constant remodeling of the organism in adaptation to new conditions; but it depends on the nature of those conditions whether the direction of the modifications effected shall be upward or downward.

  Thomas Huxley

  Science, Errors, Perfection

  Thomas Henry Huxley (2004). “Evolution And Ethics”, p.247, 1st World Publishing

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• I've done my share of period stuff. I'm not sure why, but people say I have a period face. The bread and butter of British TV is Jane Austen adaptations and bridges and bonnets and boats and horses.

  Tom Hiddleston

  Horse, Bridges, People

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• The difference between a path and a road is not only the obvious one. A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place. It is a sort of ritual of familiarity. As a form, it is a form of contact with a known landscape. It is not destructive. It is the perfect adaptation, through experience and familiarity, of movement to place; it obeys the natural contours; such obstacles as it meets it goes around.

  Wendell Berry

  Differences, Perfect, Movement

  Wendell Berry (2003). “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry”, p.12, Counterpoint

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• You and I share the same DNA. Is there anything more lonely than that?

  Charlie Kaufman

  Lonely, Dna, Share

  Charlie Kaufman (2001*). “Adaptation: Screenplay”

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• As he paid the hansom and followed his wife's long train into the house he took refuge in the comforting platitude that the first six months were always the most difficult in marriage. 'After that I suppose we shall have pretty nearly finished rubbing off each other’s angles,' he reflected; but the worst of it was that May's pressure was already bearing on the very angles whose sharpness he most wanted to keep

  Edith Wharton

  Wife, Long, House

  Edith Wharton (2006). “The Age of Innocence”, p.148, OUP Oxford

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• (before playing Headfirst Slide Into Cooperstown On A Bad Bet) I couldn't really come up with a short way to sum up this song, but I was watching the movie 'Adaptation' the other day and this sort of sums it up in my head. You are not who loves you. You are who you love. Always remember that.

  Pete Wentz

  Song, Love You, Way

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• There are too many ideas and things and people. Too many directions to go. I was starting to believe the reason it matters to care passionately about something, is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size.

  Charlie Kaufman

  Believe, Ideas, People

  Charlie Kaufman (2001*). “Adaptation: Screenplay”

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• Unless man can make new and original adaptations to his environment as rapidly as his science can change the environment, our culture will perish.

  Carl Rogers

  Change, Science, Men

  Carl Rogers (2012). “On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy”, p.348, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• What an odd time to be a fundamentalist about adaptation and natural selection - when each major subdiscipline of evolutionary biology has been discovering other mechanisms as adjuncts to selection's centrality.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Odd, Biology, Natural

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• Historical fact: People stopped being people in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we've all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joy-sticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

  Years, People, Car

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• God help you if you use voice-over in your work, my friends. God help you. That's flaccid, sloppy writing. Any idiot can write a voice-over narration to explain the thoughts of a character.

  Robert McKee

  Writing, Character, Voice

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• If it's a good work of adaptation, the book should remain a book and the film should remain a film, and you should not necessarily read the book to see the film. If you do need that, then that means that it's a failure. That is what I think.

  Marjane Satrapi

  Book, Mean, Thinking

  Interview with Sheila Roberts, collider.com. August 9, 2012.

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• Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Inspirational, Change, Attitude

  "Everybody's political what's what?" by George Bernard Shaw, Chapter XXXVII, (p. 330), 1944.

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