Quotes About Evolution

Ogburn and Thomas found 148 instances of independent innovation, most them occurring within the same decade.

Good ideas are not conjured out of thin air; they are built out of a collection of existing parts, the composition of which expands (and, occasionally, contracts) over time. Some of those parts are conceptual: ways of solving problems, or new definitions of what constitutes a problem in the first place. Some of them are, literally, mechanical parts.

The adjacent possible is as much about limits as it is about openings. At every moment in the timeline of an expanding biosphere, there are doors that cannot be unlocked yet.

All of us live inside our own private versions of the adjacent possible. In our work lives, in our creative pursuits, in the organizations that employ us, in the communities we inhabit—in all these different environments, we are surrounded by potential new configurations, new ways of breaking out of our standard routines.

shaking ourselves free of this common misconception: an idea is not a single thing. It is more like a swarm.

Up to now, the philosophers of emergence have struggled to interpret the world. But they are now starting to change it.

somewhere within a thousand years of the first cities emerging, human beings invented a whole new way of inventing.

anti-"lightbulb moment," the idea that comes into focus over decades, not seconds.

Ideas trickle out of science, into the flow of commerce, where they drift into less protectable eddies of art and philosophy.

The trouble with error is that we have a natural tendency to dismiss it.

las ideas son como un trabajo de bricolaje: se construyen a partir de restos. Tomamos las que hemos heredado, o nos hemos encontrado por casualidad, y las reorganizamos dándoles nueva forma.

The Web is not simply an ecosystem; it is a specific type of ecosystem. It started as a desert, and it has been steadily transforming into a coral reef.

When Guier, Weiffenbach, and McClure were designing their system to help American submarines launch Polaris missiles against the Soviet Union, it never occurred to them that someday someone would use their platform to rave about a bowl of potato and leek soup to nearby strangers. Stacked platforms are like that: you think you're fighting the Cold War, and it turns out you're actually helping people figure out where to have lunch.

In the contemporary rendition, it's not that the slave technology grows stronger than us and learns to disobey our commands—it's that we deteriorate to the level of the machines. Smart technology makes us dumber.

Buckminster Fuller said don't try to change human behavior. It's s a waste of time. Evolution doesn't mess around; the patterns are too deep. Fuller said go after the tools. Better tools lead to better people. Arctic doesn't develop products. We may cultivate them, occasionally, in our own particular way, but our business is change. Significant change.

Words are too recent an imprinting. Animals, though, are part of our ancient grammar, prehistorically embedded in the brain.

The move from self-authoring to self-transforming for example? Fewer than 5 percent of us ever make that jump.

Hybridization, he figures, is destined to become one of the ways this generation out-rebels the last generation. How we went from long-haired hippie freaks to pierced punk rockers to transsexual teenagers taking hormones.

Some revolutions begin with a gunshot, others with a party. This

Psychologist Robert Kegan,8 chair of adult development at Harvard, has a term for unzipping those costumes. He calls it "the subject-object shift" and argues that it's the single most important move we can make to accelerate personal growth.

Sometimes I feel that I am slowly erasing muself, in order for someone else to appear, the one I long for, who will not resemble me.

Our greatest enemies are ultimately not our political adversaries but entropy, evolution (in the form of pestilence and the flaws in human nature), and most of all ignorance—a shortfall of knowledge of how best to solve our problems.

The typical imperative from biology is not Thou shalt... , but If ... then ... else.

Evolutionarily speaking, there is seldom any mystery in why we seek the goals we seek — why, for example, people would rather make love with an attractive partner than get a slap on the belly with a wet fish.