Adaptive Change Quotes

There is another very specific quality which distinguishes them [man from animals], and which will admit of no dispute. This is the faculty of self-improvement, which, by the help of circumstances, gradually develops all the rest of our faculties, and is inherent in the species as in the individual: whereas a brute is, at the end of a few months, all he will ever be during his whole life, and his species, at the end of a thousand years, exactly what it was the first year of that thousand.

The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.

For me, change doesn't happen on a linear basis; it zig-zags back and forth.

Natural selection certainly operates. It explains how bacteria will gain antibiotic resistance; it will explain how insects get insecticide resistance, but it doesn't explain how you get bacteria or insects in the first place.

We want traditional change—not transformational change.

Throughout history, the organizational evolution of the military has been inextricably linked with that of the business world.

Almost all change is evolutionary, not revolutionary... expectations always travel at higher speeds.

There is change by necessity or adaptation, and there is contrived change or novelty.

That competition and the struggle for existence is the mechanism behind this state of perpetual change.

I mean, we're always trying to evaluate and tweak things and get better.

I had found again and again that the most aberrant population of a species - often having reached species rank, and occasionally classified even as a separate genus - occurred at a peripheral location, indeed usually at the most isolated peripheral location.

. . . it is worth discussing radical changes, not in the expectation that they will be adopted promptly but for two other reasons. One is to construct an ideal goal, so that incremental changes can be judged by whether they move the institutional structure toward or away from that ideal. The other reason is very different. It is so that if a crisis requiring or facilitating radical change does arise, alternatives will be available that have been carefully developed and fully explored.

Old, deeply engrained systems take time to change, but we can't leave it to time.

And in reaching out and doing these new things you get into this strange kind of shape where you are better off than if you were just resting, because you're using things that wouldn't otherwise be mute.

Natural selection is not the wind which propels the vessel, but the rudder which, by friction, now on this side and now on that, shapes the course.

Are we at some kind of evolutionary equipoise as a species? Or, are we destined to become something different - something, perhaps, even better adapted to the environment?

Evolution is a tinkerer.

Effectively, change is almost impossible without industry-wide collaboration, cooperation and consensus.

Transformation is not automatic. It must be learned; it must be led.

The church can challenge society, but society also challenges the church. That's good. We should be humble enough to be able to accept that.

Change is not a linear process; it's an all-encompassing process, and it's alive in different ways.

A disease is never a mere loss or excess. There is always a reaction on the part of the organism or individual to restore, replace or compensate for and to preserve its identity, however strange the means may be.

If human thought is a growth, like all other growths, its logic is without foundation of its own, and is only the adjusting constructiveness of all other growing things. A tree cannot find out, as it were, how to blossom, until comes blossom-time. A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine-time.

Every acquisition of accommodation becomes material for assimilation, but assimilation always resists new accommodations.

The evolution of cultures appears to follow the pattern of the evolution of species. The many different forms of culture which arise correspond to the "mutations" of genetic theory. Some forms prove to be effective under prevailing circumstances and others not, and the perpetuation of the culture is determined accordingly.