Adoption Anniversary Quotes

In areas where there were only hunter-gatherers to begin with, those groups of hunter-gatherers who adopted food production outbred those who didn’t.

As with any new skill, attitude, style, or belief, adopting a coaching ethos requires commitment, practice, and some time before it flows naturally and its effectiveness is optimized.

In this long history of accelerating development, one can single out two especially significant jumps. The first, occurring between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago, probably was made possible by genetic changes in our bodies: namely, by evolution of the modern anatomy permitting modern speech or modern brain function, or both. That jump led to bone tools, single-purpose stone tools, and compound tools. The second jump resulted from our adoption of a sedentary lifestyle, which happened at different times in different parts of the world, as early as 13,000 years ago in some areas and not even today in others.

All of the likely or possible independent inventions of writing (in Sumer, Mexico, China, and Egypt), and all of the early adaptations of those invented systems (for example, those in Crete, Iran, Turkey, the Indus Valley, and the Maya area), involved socially stratified societies with complex and centralized political institutions, whose necessary relation to food production we shall explore in a later chapter. Early writing served the needs of those political institutions (such as record keeping and royal propaganda), and the users were full-time bureaucrats nourished by stored food surpluses grown by food-producing peasants. Writing was never developed or even adopted by hunter-gatherer societies, because they lacked both the institutional uses of early writing and the social and agricultural mechanisms for generating the food surpluses required to feed scribes.

That is, the adoption of food production exemplifies what is termed an autocatalytic process—one that catalyzes itself in a positive feedback cycle, going faster and faster once it has started.

Wait, you said one. Does that mean there’s a two? And does this two have anything to do with why your brother and Noah are crashing our anniversary?” Atticus rolled his eyes. “They’re not, I promise. I just needed them to…babysit your present.” “Babysit my present?” Jericho repeated slowly. Atticus grinned. “You’ll see.” Jericho studied Atticus’s face. “Did you, like, adopt a baby without telling me? I think we’ve already got a full house at home.” “Yes, I adopted an infant and asked my brother and his fiancé to drive it out to the middle of the woods so I could present it to you in our murder cabin as a surprise.” When Jericho continued to stare, Atticus laughed.

Most peasant farmers and herders, who constitute the great majority of the world’s actual food producers, aren’t necessarily better off than hunter-gatherers. Time budget studies show that they may spend more rather than fewer hours per day at work than hunter-gatherers do. Archaeologists have demonstrated that the first farmers in many areas were smaller and less well nourished, suffered from more serious diseases, and died on the average at a younger age than the hunter-gatherers they replaced. If those first farmers could have foreseen the consequences of adopting food production, they might not have opted to do so. Why, unable to foresee the result, did they nevertheless make that choice?

Islamic societies in the Middle East are relatively conservative and not at the forefront of technology. But medieval Islam in the same region was technologically advanced and open to innovation. It achieved far higher literacy rates than contemporary Europe; it assimilated the legacy of classical Greek civilization to such a degree that many classical Greek books are now known to us only through Arabic copies; it invented or elaborated windmills, tidal mills, trigonometry, and lateen sails; it made major advances in metallurgy, mechanical and chemical engineering, and irrigation methods; and it adopted paper and gunpowder from China and transmitted them to Europe. In the Middle Ages the flow of technology was overwhelmingly from Islam to Europe, rather than from Europe to Islam as it is today. Only after around A.D. 1500 did the net direction of flow begin to reverse.

The second jump resulted from our adoption of a sedentary lifestyle, which happened at different times in different parts of the world, as early as 13,000 years ago in some areas and not even today in others. For the most part, that adoption was linked to our adoption of food production, which required us to remain close to our crops, orchards, and stored food surpluses. Sedentary living was decisive for the history of technology, because it enabled people to accumulate nonportable possessions. Nomadic hunter-gatherers are limited to technology that can be carried. If you move often and lack vehicles or draft animals, you confine your possessions to babies, weapons, and a bare minimum of other absolute necessities small enough to carry. You can’t be burdened with pottery and printing presses as you shift camp. That practical difficulty probably explains the tantalizingly early appearance of some technologies, followed by a long delay in their further development.

Concerning Attis, apologist Weigall remarks: Then again, there was the worship of Attis, a very popular religion which must have influenced the early Christians. Attis was the Good Shepherd, the son of Cybele, the Great Mother, or alternatively, of the Virgin Nana, who conceived him without union with mortal man, as in the story of the Virgin Mary... In Rome the festival of his death and resurrection was annually held from March 22nd to 25th; and the connection of this religion with Christianity is shown by the fact that in Phrygia, Gaul, Italy and other countries where Attis-worship was powerful, the Christians adopted the actual date, March 25th, as the anniversary of our Lord's passion.258

And then it occurred to me the other day . . . almost like a light bulb going off above my head as I sat and pondered my singleness, and the answer became crystal clear. Why does singleness have this overwhelmingly negative connotation? Because we don’t celebrate our singles. Like, at all. We just don’t. I mean, yeah . . . we have birthdays, of course . . . but who over the age of about twenty-five really makes a big deal out of their birthday? And besides, everybody has a birthday, so that doesn’t count. We simply don’t celebrate our singles. We celebrate our couples for making the decision to get married. We celebrate them again once they actually get married. We celebrate their choice to start a family (and then celebrate them again and again and sometimes again and again and again when they decide to expand that family). We celebrate the anniversaries of their marriages and the christenings and baptisms of their babies and their kids’ birthdays and their buying of a new home or choosing to adopt. Sometimes we even celebrate when they decide to end their marriage. But we simply don’t celebrate our singles.

The failure to adopt other people’s points of view, to take an imaginative leap out of oneself, is one way to account for much of the behavior we find, troublesome, from littering to murder. (Kafka once referred to war as “a monstrous failure of imagination.”) Perspective taking helps us at once to see others as fundamentally similar to ourselves despite superficial differences (in that we share a common humanity)

To use coaching successfully we have to adopt a far more optimistic view than usual of the dormant capability of all people. Pretending we are optimistic is insufficient because our genuine beliefs are conveyed in many subtle ways of which we are not aware.

EXPERIMENT That our beliefs about the capability of others have a direct impact on their performance has been adequately demonstrated in a number of experiments from the field of education. In these tests teachers are told, wrongly, that a group of average pupils are either scholarship candidates or have learning difficulties. They teach a set curriculum to the group for a period of time. Subsequent academic tests show that the pupils’ results invariably reflect the false beliefs of their teachers about their ability. It is equally true that the performance of employees will reflect the beliefs of their managers. For example, Fred sees himself as having limited potential. He feels safe only when he operates well within his prescribed limit. This is like his shell. His manager will only trust him with tasks within that shell. The manager will give him task A, because he trusts Fred to do it and Fred is able to do it. The manager will not give him task B, because he sees this as beyond Fred’s capability. He sees only Fred’s performance, not his potential. If he gives the task to the more experienced Jane instead, which is expedient and understandable, the manager reinforces or validates Fred’s shell and increases its strength and thickness. He needs to do the opposite, to help Fred venture outside his shell, to support or coach him to success with task B. To use coaching successfully we have to adopt a far more optimistic view than usual of the dormant capability of all people. Pretending we are optimistic is insufficient because our genuine beliefs are conveyed in many subtle ways of which we are not aware.

The Islamic Republic of Pakistan partition, from the Republic of India, and as entire Secular India, independence from the British Empire enter its 70th anniversary. Unfortunately, both countries fail, within its real conception of freedom as India in its secular system and Pakistan as in its democratic prospect in the perception of Islamic values that cause the partition from India. Consequently, Pakistan bore the lesson of the partition of its East Pakistan, becoming Bangladesh. Beyond all other issues, the both Pakistan and India would have become the great, richest, and powerful nations in the world map if both sides had adopted the vision, dialogue of mutual interests, and toleration for the peace and harmony. In an open fact, enmity, with the diplomatic idiocy damaged, not only the old traditional and literary relationships but also the economic destruction on both sides. Both countries produce and facilitate, and sponsor the extremists and terrorists for self-destruction on self-costs and lives. How long both countries stay on that strategy, which gains nothing, except suffering from that, both sides people? Ehsan Sehgal