Quotes About Evolution

since mistakes lower the odds of future mistakes.

Someone paid a price for the system to improve.

Corollary to Moore's Law: every ten years, collective wisdom degrades by half.*

show how some degree of unpredictability (or lack of knowledge) can be beneficial to our defective species.

As we saw, nature has a filter to keep the good baby and get rid of the bad.

In fact, the most interesting aspect of evolution is that it only works because of its antifragility; it is in love with stressors, randomness, uncertainty, and disorder—while individual organisms are relatively fragile, the gene pool takes advantage of shocks to enhance its fitness.

users of these machines gain no strength beyond an initial phase.

What did not kill me did not make me stronger, but spared me because i am stronger than others; but it killed others and the average population is now stronger because the weak are gone.

Genes follow majority rule; languages minority rule. Languages travel; genes less so.

Ele percebeu que algumas coisas precisam se quebrar para que o sistema se aperfeiçoe — o que é denominado de destruição criativa —, uma noção desenvolvida, entre muitos outros, pelo filósofo Karl Marx, e um conceito descoberto, como mostraremos no capítulo 17, por Nietzsche.

The laser is a prime illustration of a tool made for a given purpose (actually no real purpose) that then found applications that were not even dreamed of at the time. It was a typical "solution looking for a problem.

Not only is it difficult for the journalist to think more like a historian, but it is, alas, the historian who is becoming more like the journalist.

without penalty to themselves from having been wrong in the first paper

History and societies do not crawl. They make jumps.

someone may evolve and contradict earlier beliefs

The story of the wheel itself is even more humbling than that of the suitcase:

While I accept the notion of epistemic base, what I question is the role it has really played in the history of technology.

If you are a Stone Age historical thinker called on to predict the future in a comprehensive report for your chief tribal planner, you must project the invention of the wheel or you will miss pretty much all of the action. Now, if you can prophesy the invention of the wheel, you already know what a wheel looks like, and thus you already know how to build a wheel, so you are already on your way. The Black Swan needs to be predicted!

There is no evolution without skin in the game.

Systems learn by removing parts, via negativa.

Ricordate questa massima: non sto dicendo che le tecnologie non invecchiano, ma solo che le tecnologie che tendevano a invecchiare sono già morte.

Even the apples we see in the stores are to be regarded with some suspicion: original apples were devoid of sweet taste and fruit corporations bred them for maximal sweetness—the mountain apples of my childhood were acid, bitter, crunchy, and much smaller than the shiny variety in U.S. stores said to keep the doctor away.

Lindy" is what ages in reverse, i.e., its life expectancy lengthens with time

But the technology is only trivial retrospectively—not prospectively.