Adapt Or Die Similar Quotes

Children today are so open. When the old folks die off, we will finally be free of racism.” “I grew up in a small rural community, so I was very sheltered. I didn’t learn anything about racism.” “I judge people by what they do, not who they are.” “I don’t see color; I see people.” “We are all red under the skin.” “I marched in the sixties.” New racism is a term coined by film professor Martin Barker to capture the ways in which racism has adapted over time so that modern norms, policies, and practices result in similar racial outcomes as those in the past, while not appearing to be explicitly racist.1 Sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva captures this dynamic in the title of his book Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America.2 He says that though virtually no one claims to be racist anymore, racism still exists. How is that possible? Racism can still exist because it is highly adaptive.

To show just how all pervasive the Committee of 300 is, a few words about the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), a Club of Rome creation and the test it ran against a nuclear power station at Three Mile Island (TMI) Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, seems in order. Termed “an accident” by a hysterical media, this was not an accident, but a deliberately designed plot to reverse favorable public opinion to nuclear power generated electricity. TMI was a crisis test for FEMA. An additional benefit was the fear and hysteria provoked by the news media, which had people fleeing the area, when in fact they were never in any danger. Bear in mind that nobody died as a result of the TMI “accident,” nor were any serious injuries reported. The stage-managed incident bore all the hall marks of a similar incident when Orson Wells scared New York and New Jersey half to death with claims that the world was being invaded by alien beings from Mars. Actually, the radio play was an adaptation of H.G. Wells “War of Worlds.” TMI was considered a success and gained favor with the anti-nuclear forces, as it provided the rallying point for the so-called “environmentalists,” well financed by Atlantic Richfield and other major oil companies and

THE MOTIVATION BEHIND behavior rarely includes the goals for which it evolved. These goals stay behind the veil of evolution. We evolved nurturant tendencies, for example, to raise our own biological children, but a cute puppy triggers these tendencies just as well. Whereas reproduction is the evolutionary goal of nurturance, it isn’t part of its motivation. After a mother dies, other adult primates often take care of her weaned juvenile. Humans, too, adopt on a large scale, often going through hellish bureaucratic procedures to add children to their families. Stranger yet is cross-species adoption, such as by Pea, a rescued ostrich at the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Kenya. Pea was beloved by all orphaned elephant calves at the trust and took special care of a baby named Jotto, who’d stay by her side and sleep with his head on her soft feathered body. The maternal instinct is remarkably generous.38 Some biological purists call such behavior a “mistake.” If adaptive goals are the measure, Pea was making a colossal error. As soon as we move from biology to psychology, however, the perspective changes. Our impulse to take care of vulnerable young is real and overwhelming even outside the family. Similarly, when human volunteers push a stranded whale back into the ocean, they employ empathic impulses that, I can assure you, didn’t evolve to take care of marine mammals. Human empathy arose for the sake of family and friends. But once a capacity exists, it takes on a life of its own. Rather than calling the saving of a whale a mistake, we should be glad that empathy isn’t tied down by what evolution intended it for. This is what makes our behavior as rich as it is. This line of thought can also be applied to sex.

Darwin found that if you looked closely enough, nature conveyed a very different message. How could, for instance, the Galápagos Islands serve as home to thirteen separate species of finches, each similar to the other, yet each peculiarly adapted with different-shaped beaks for their particular island habitats? Clearly these finches had migrated over time from the mainland and from one island to another, and then, once separated, had begun to diverge and to become distinct from one another. But how? And why? Why did the giant sloths, whose bones Darwin recovered on his voyage, go extinct, while other creatures thrived in the same environment at the same time? And how was it that some animals seemed poorly designed for their environments, in defiance of Paley’s perfect watchmaker—woodpeckers that lived on treeless terrain, land birds with webbed feet—yet they managed to adapt and survive through makeshift means that no divine designer would ever have intended? Why did pythons have vestigial legs, and why did the bones inside the wings of a bat parallel the bones in the human hand and arm? This was evidence not of a master design, Darwin realized, but of a slow and gradual change in existing forms, spread across the ages, inherited from remote—and shared—ancestors. The evidence he painstakingly assembled on his voyage, then presented, bit by bit, in his classic book, pointed to very slow, very gradual changes in living things over millions of years, to creatures suddenly dying out and disappearing when their forms no longer allowed them to survive in a changing climate or environment, and to new forms of life that emerged and thrived in their place.

Like when our neighbour’s boy has broken a cup, or something similar, we are ready to say, “this type of things can and do happen”; be assured, then, that when your own cup is broken, you should act in the same way as when another’s cup is broken. Now apply this to greater things. Is the child or wife of another person dead? There is no one who wouldn’t say, “This is unfortunately a part of life.” But if anyone’s own child happens to die, it is immediately, “Look what has happened to me!

Plenty of people worked long hours, though. Jens Horstmann attributed Huang’s success to his adaptability. “I’ve often asked myself, how is it that we started in the same cubicle, you know, with a similar IQ, both working equally hard,” Horstmann said. “How is it that this person not only built this amazing company, but also a network around him of people that—that would just die for him if needed?” Huang, Horstmann believed, had changed himself many times. He recalled Huang at LSI, pushing the simulation software to its outer limits. “Now, he’s still doing the same thing, but what he’s engineering is himself. He was not born as a great CEO; he was not destined to be one. He transformed himself into one, just by abstracting!