Meridel Le Sueur Quotes

I think when you work on fossils, and you realize that a species is there, and it's abundant for quite a long period of time, and then at some point it's no longer there - and so, when you look at that bigger picture, yes, you realize that either you change and adapt, or, as a species, you go extinct.

Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature's inexorable imperative.

It's like the animal kingdom. Adapt or go extinct.

We can be the new brand of self-extincting dinosaurs or we can evolve.

There are two options: adapt or die.

IF you don't change, you can become extinct!

Nature conserves, prefers novelty.

Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.

Adapt or die.

Adapt or Die

Evolution never stops or ends. Such a cessation would be cataclysmic catastrophe.

It is not the strongest of the species that survives. Nor is it the most intelligent. It is the members of the species that are most adaptive to change.

I am a student of evolution and adaptation.

The point of human evolution is adapting to circumstance. Not letting go of the old, but adapting it, is necessary.

Most organisms either adapt and become part of the system, or get wiped out. The only thing we have to adapt to the system with is our brain. If we don't use it, and we don't adapt fast enough, we won't survive.

I am a big believer of what Darwin discovered in the Galapagos, proving that the species most responsive to change will survive over apparently stronger or more intelligent competitors.

Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress.

The history of life is a tale of decimation and later stabilization of few surviving anatomies, not a story of steady expansion and progress.

If you do not change, you can become extinct !

As some species die out, forms better adapted to utilize the obstacles against which they struggled in vain come into being.

Expediency is a law of nature. The camel is a wonderful animal, but the desert made the camel.

If we measured success by longevity, then dinosaurs must rank as the number one success story in the history of land life.

To exist is to adapt, and if one could not adapt, one died and made room for those who could.

Man wants to see nature and evolution as separate from human activities. There is a natural world, and there is man. But man also belongs to the natural world. If he is a ferocious predator, that too is part of evolution. If cod and haddock and other species cannot survive because man kills them, something more adaptable will take their place. Nature, the ultimate pragmatist, doggedly searches for something that works. But as the cockroach demonstrates, what works best in nature does not always appeal to us.

The snake that cannot shed its skin perishes.