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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• It happens that there are a lot of people who are very talented who also happen to have a mental disorder. A lot of the mental disorders are initially things that are adaptive. Like even OCD, it's good to sort of have structure and have certain rituals but when it gets to be extreme then it becomes problematic.

  H. A. Berlin

  People, Ocd, Structure

  Source: bigthink.com

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• 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.

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• 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

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• This use of building blocks to generate internal models is a pervasive feature of complex adaptive systems.

  John Henry Holland

  Block, Use, Building

  John Henry Holland (1995). “Hidden order: how adaptation builds complexity”, Addison-Wesley Longman

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• 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

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• The pursuit of knowledge is an intoxicant, a lure that scientists and explorers have known from ancient times; indeed, exhilaration in the pursuit of knowledge is part of what has kept our species so adaptive.

  Kay Redfield Jamison

  Knowledge, Exhilaration, Ancient

  Kay Redfield Jamison (2004). “Exuberance: The Passion for Life”, p.180, Vintage

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• 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

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• 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

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• The human brain is still undergoing rapid adaptive evolution,.

  Howard Hughes

  Brain, Evolution, Rapids

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• Foresight turns out to be a critical adaptive strategy for times of great stress.

  Jamais Cascio

  Stress, Strategy, Turns

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• 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

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• A...reason we are so-so scientists is that our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not.

  Steven Pinker

  Brain, Sometimes, Truth Is

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• Everybody remembers numbers and computers remember numbers. People remember procedures and computers certainly remember procedures. But the other thing that's still important is that your perception as a human is affected subtly by all this stuff that you can't quite articulate. You run your life according to all this stuff that's happened to you. All of your memories affect everything you do whereas with a computer, there's adaptive software and things, but it's more literal.

  Bill Nye

  Running, Memories, Numbers

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• Highly-adaptive, informal networks move diagonally and eliptically, skipping entire functions to get things done.

  Jacques Barzun

  Moving, Done, Function

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