Adaptation Quotes

Remember that in every single case in history the process of adaptation has been one of exceeding slowness. Do not look for the impossible, but do not let your path deviate from the quiet and steadfast insistence on full opportunities for your powers. (Franz Boas)
Every adaptation requires that the screenwriter make difficult choices - and in particular, difficult cuts. View quote
David Benioff
Life is neither static nor unchanging. With no individuality, there can be no change, no adaptation and, in an inherently changing world, any species unable to adapt is also doomed. View quote
Jean M. Auel
People seem to get used to anything, and it is a short step from adaptation to attachment. View quote
Lionel Shriver
I'm going to do an adaptation of the Italian film, Bread and Tulips. I really like that film. View quote
Norman Jewison
In all works on Natural History, we constantly find details of the marvellous adaptation of animals to their food, their habits, and the localities in which they are found. View quote
Alfred Russel Wallace
Throughout his last half-dozen books, for example, Arthur Koestler has been conducting a campaign against his own misunderstanding of Darwinism. He hopes to find some ordering force, constraining evolution to certain directions and overriding the influence of natural selection. [...] Darwinism is not the theory of capricious change that Koestler imagines. Random variation may be the raw material of change, but natural selection builds good design by rejecting most variants while accepting and accumulating the few that improve adaptation to local environments. View quote
Stephen Jay Gould
Darwinian natural selection only yields adaptation to changing local environments, and better function in an immediate habitat might just as well be achieved by greater simplicity in form and behavior as by ever-increasing complexity. View quote
Stephen Jay Gould
A complete theory of evolution must acknowledge a balance between "external” forces of environment imposing selection for local adaptation and "internal” forces representing constraints of inheritance and development. Vavilov placed too much emphasis on internal constraints and downgraded the power of selection. But Western Darwinians have erred equally in practically ignoring (while acknowledging in theory) the limits placed on selection by structure and development-what Vavilov and the older biologists would have called "laws of form.”. View quote
Stephen Jay Gould
We are inescapably the result of a long heritage of learning, adaptation, mutation and evolution, the product of a history which predates our birth as a biological species and stretches back over many thousand millennia... Going further back, we share a common ancestry with our fellow primates; and going still further back, we share a common ancestry with all other living creatures and plants down to the simplest microbe. The further back we go, the greater the difference from external appearances and behavior patterns which we observe today. View quote
Fred Hoyle
Whatever there be of progress in life comes not through adaptation but through daring. (Henry Miller)
The best estimates are that it takes a minimum of fifty thousand years for an adaptation to show up in the human genome. This is called evolutionary lag... Our hunter-gatherer ancestors had a very different lifestyle... View quote
Daniel Levitin
Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation. View quote
Octavia Butler
Repression is an evolutionary adaptation permitting us to function under the burden of our expanded consciousness. For what we are conscious of could drive us mad. View quote
Camille Paglia
Since we live in a society that promotes faddism and temporary superficial adaptation of different values, we are easily convinced that changes have occurred in arenas where there has been little or no change. View quote
Bell hooks
I think, then, that man, after having satisfied his first longing for facts, wanted something fuller - some grouping, some adaptation to his capacity and experience, of the links of this vast chain of events which his sight could not take in. View quote
Alfred de Vigny
As a consequence, geneticists described evolution simply as a change in gene frequencies in populations, totally ignoring the fact that evolution consists of the two simultaneous but quite separate phenomena of adaptation and diversification. View quote
Ernst Mayr
I've made seventeen or eighteen films now, only two of which have been original screenplays, all the others have been based on short stories or novels, and I find the long short story ideal for adaptation. View quote
Satyajit Ray
Adaptation is a vital part of a response to the challenge of climate change. View quote
Nicholas Stern
If we turn to the differences separating Communist, Fascist, and National Socialist regimes, we find that they can be accounted for by contrasting social, economic, and cultural condition in which the three had to operate. In other words, they resulted from tactical adaptation of the same philosophy of government to local circumstances, not from different philosophies. View quote
Richard Pipes
After Strangelove I also started work on an adaptation of The Collector. (Terry Southern)
A pattern of shared basic assumptions invented, discovered, or developed by a given group as it learns to cope with its problems of external adaptation and internal integration that have worked well enough to be considered valid and therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think and feel in relation to those problems. View quote
Edgar H. Schein
In the game of life, less diversity means fewer options for change. Wild or domesticated, panda or pea, adaptation is the requirement for survival. View quote
Cary Fowler
For the source of any characteristic so widespread and uniform as this adaptation to environment we must go back to the very beginning of the human race. View quote
Ellsworth Huntington
The Constitution remains brilliant in its overall design and sound with respect to the Bill of Rights and the separation of powers. But there are numerous archaic provisions that inhibit constructive change and adaptation. These constitutional bits affect the daily life of the republic and every citizen in it. View quote
Larry Sabato