Quotes About Evolution

The age of the insect, he thinks. The meek truly shall inherit the earth.

The future is suddenly unpinned—evolving, spinning, leaping about like a panicked tree-loormor.

The pilot, Wedge Antilles, once Red Leader and now—well, now something else, a role without a formal title, as yet

awakening. Listen, it's like the Death card in the Tarot. Movies always make it seem like the Death card is a bad thing—a literal death—but no, it's a metaphorical death, a figurative one, and that means transformation, transition, and maybe that's where we are now, as people, as humans.

The first force is evolution. Humanity changing, growing, becoming better than it was. The second force is ruination. Humanity making its best effort to demonstrate its worst tendencies. A march toward self-destruction.

competitive exclusion (n) 1. a situation in which one species competes another into extinction.

If no use is made of the labours of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge.

A problem is a way of creating a future. When plants grow and evolve they do so by way of problems, developing features to avoid predators, to maximise light or to retain moisture.

But just as the world is opening up, it's closing too, and things reveal their previously unimagined shapes.

there's a period of accommodation before you are formally and

Maybe I made her feel trapped, like she'd outgrown me. But from my side, it was like I knew her too well, I saw her too clearly, when she no longer wanted to be known: she wanted to try out a new role, and didn't want to be reminded that it was fake.

Don't plan it, don't overthink it, just let it happen, you've got to find a way to bridge the chasm from here to there, from this unthinkable present to some unthinkable future . . .

But our friendship was, at the same time, like a city you hadn't visited in a long time, where you know the streets by heart but the shops and restaurants have changed, so you can find your way from the church to the town square, no problem, but you don't know where to get ice cream or a decent sandwich.

Ah well. You know what they say. Progress, not perfection. That's why it's called training. Shall we begin again?

Would it insult you if I used your alphabet? I don't think I could start from scratch.

The techniques that worked so extraordinarily well when applied to sustaining technologies, however, clearly failed badly when applied to markets or applications that did not yet exist.

Research suggests that in over 90 percent of all successful new businesses, historically, the strategy that the founders had deliberately decided to pursue was not the strategy that ultimately led to the business's success.

Getting something wrong doesn't mean you have failed. Instead, you have just learned what does not work. You now know to try something else.

Disruption is, at its core, a really powerful idea.

They must be plans for learning rather than plans for implementation.

Figure I.1 The Impact of Sustaining and Disruptive Technological Change

If history is any guide, companies that keep disruptive technologies bottled up in their labs, working to improve them until they suit mainstream markets, will not be nearly as successful as firms that find markets that embrace the attributes of disruptive technologies as they initially stand.

Professor Amar Bhide showed in his Origin and Evolution of New Business that 93 percent of all companies that ultimately become successful had to abandon their original strategy—because the original plan proved not to be viable.

The past is a good predictor of the future only when conditions in the future resemble conditions in the past. And what works for a firm in one context might not work for another firm in a different context.