Quotes About Evolution

Hierarchical systems evolve from the bottom up. The purpose of the upper layers of the hierarchy is to serve the purposes of the lower layers.

Complex systems can evolve from simple systems only if there are stable intermediate forms. The resulting complex forms will naturally be hierarchic.

Mental flexibility—the willingness to redraw boundaries, to notice that a system has shifted into a new mode, to see how to redesign structure—is a necessity when you live in a world of flexible systems.

I have known Nature. I have known Civilization. Civilization is better.

Lampedusa had it right—things had to seem to change so that things could remain the same.

DONNA: Why do traditional organizing solutions and tools not work for them?

Some things may never change but other things can be so completely different that they make the things that don't change bearable.

It's a lot of work to keep reinventing yourself and coming up with new stuff, but that's what it takes to be in show business.

Life reflects our painful past over and over until we learn another way and consciously heal.

El cambio de milenio nos va a traer cambios positivos significativos en nuestros sistemas educativos, gubernamentales, legales y de telecomunicaciones. Nuestros habitos alimenticios cambiaran drasticamente, asi como las expectativas de vida.

Life displays mad hospitality. The Korean biologist Kwang Jeon of the University of Tennessee received in the 1970s a batch of amoebas infected with a deadly bacterial strain. Most died. In a set of careful experiments after culturing the survivor amoebas for several generations, he found that the survivors, with fewer bacteria per cell, could no longer live without their infection.

Today it is widely recognized that the cells of animals were once a wild party of two if not three ancient beings: the oxygen-poisoned archaeon host, the oxygen-using bacteria that became mitochondria, and perhaps wildly squirming spirochetes, which abound in anaerobic environments.

The really frightening thing about middle age is that you know you'll grow out of it.

I'm learning something all the time. That's the way I want it to go, and that's the way I'll go until I am no longer on this planet.

Maybe as you aged, what you wanted from a relationship changed too.

But I came across a sentence in the book I was reading, HUMAN PERSONALITY, by F. W. H. Myers, which was so illuminating that I put the book aside to consider all the ideas suggested in that one penetrating hypothesis. When I picked up the book again I was a different person.

Change, when it comes, cracks everything open.

The story the body lives in is crazy there is no end to it but change.

Change happens very slow and very sudden.

A novel is more a symphony, opera, oratorio. It exists in time, it goes by you a sound dying out as you write on, so that it is very hard to keep in touch with the whole thing...

I declare! Sometimes it seems to me that every time a new piece of machinery comes into the door some of our wits fly out the window!

That night I experienced one of those sudden, unpleasant shifts of perception that occur to parents, when you notice a difference in your child that's been coming over a long time, and you're faced with it, and at the same time you're groping back to touch the child they were a minute ago, while a somehow unaccountable, unpredictable person is watching you, waiting for you to catch up with them, contemptuous because you haven't.

At the same time, he was aware that literature was more than sociological data: it changes, not just reflects, expectations and experiences.

I want to tell her that this isn't 'love'. that 'love' doesn't stay the same, it changes like we do, it is shaped by our experiences, by what we do, who we meet, what we learn. I'd like to explain that falling in love now is not how it'll be forever, and even if you stay with the same boy for the rest of your life, this incarnation of love won't stay the same, it never does.