Evolve Or Repeat Quotes

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Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: 'You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.
Doris Lessing (The Golden Notebook)
Conscious thoughts, repeated often enough, become unconscious thinking.
Joe Dispenza (Evolve Your Brain: The Science of Changing Your Mind)
Your job then, should you choose to accept it, is to keep searching for the metaphors, rituals and teachers that will help you move ever closer to divinity. The Yogic scriptures say that God responds to the sacred prayers and efforts of human beings in any way whatsoever that mortals choose to worship—just so long as those prayers are sincere. I think you have every right to cherry-pick when it comes to moving your spirit and finding peace in God. I think you are free to search for any metaphor whatsoever which will take you across the worldly divide whenever you need to be transported or comforted. It's nothing to be embarrassed about. It's the history of mankind's search for holiness. If humanity never evolved in its exploration of the divine, a lot of us would still be worshipping golden Egyptian statues of cats. And this evolution of religious thinking does involve a fair bit of cherry-picking. You take whatever works from wherever you can find it, and you keep moving toward the light. The Hopi Indians thought that the world's religions each contained one spiritual thread, and that these threads are always seeking each other, wanting to join. When all the threads are finally woven together they will form a rope that will pull us out of this dark cycle of history and into the next realm. More contemporarily, the Dalai Lama has repeated the same idea, assuring his Western students repeatedly that they needn't become Tibetan Buddhists in order to be his pupils. He welcomes them to take whatever ideas they like out of Tibetan Buddhism and integrate these ideas into their own religious practices. Even in the most unlikely and conservative of places, you can find sometimes this glimmering idea that God might be bigger than our limited religious doctrines have taught us. In 1954, Pope Pius XI, of all people, sent some Vatican delegates on a trip to Libya with these written instructions: "Do NOT think that you are going among Infidels. Muslims attain salvation, too. The ways of Providence are infinite." But doesn't that make sense? That the infinite would be, indeed ... infinite? That even the most holy amongst us would only be able to see scattered pieces of the eternal picture at any given time? And that maybe if we could collect those pieces and compare them, a story about God would begin to emerge that resembles and includes everyone? And isn't our individual longing for transcendence all just part of this larger human search for divinity? Don't we each have the right to not stop seeking until we get as close to the source of wonder as possible? Even if it means coming to India and kissing trees in the moonlight for a while? That's me in the corner, in other words. That's me in the spotlight. Choosing my religion.
Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love)
A culture cannot evolve without honest, powerful storytelling. When a society repeatedly experiences glossy, hollowed-out, pseudo-stories, it degenerates. We need true satires and tragedies, dramas and comedies that shine a clean light into the dingy corners of the human psyche and society.
Robert McKee (Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting)
A well-designed life is a life that is generative—it is constantly creative, productive, changing, evolving, and there is always the possibility of surprise. You get out of it more than you put in. There is a lot more than “lather, rinse, repeat” in a well-designed life.
Bill Burnett (Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life)
True leaders admit their mistakes, learn from their mistakes, and evolve so that the same mistakes are not repeated.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
In Egyptian Arabic, the word 'insan' means 'human'. If we remove the 'n', the word becomes 'insa', which means 'to forget'. So you see, the word 'forget' is taken from the word 'human'. And since it was God who created our minds and hearts, He knew from the very beginning that we would quickly forget our history, only to keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again. So the ultimate test of every human is to seek wisdom. After all, wisdom is gained from having a good memory. Only after we have passed this test will we evolve to become better humans. Man is only a forgetful mortal, but God — He sees, hears and remembers everything.
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
Bitterness is not your friend. It's easy to become cynical, focusing your energies on them and endlessly wondering why they aren't more evolved and why they are still stuck back there, repeating the same slogans and going through the same motions. If you are filled with pride over how free and intelligent and enlightened you are in comparison to their backward, antiquated ways, your new knowledge has simply made you arrogant. Watch your heart carefully, because if you aren't more compassionate and more kind and more understanding, then you haven't grown at all.
Rob Bell (What Is the Bible?: How an Ancient Library of Poems, Letters, and Stories Can Transform the Way You Think and Feel About Everything)
Let us never weary of repeating, that to think first of the disinherited and sorrowful classes; to relieve, ventilate, enlighten, and love them; to enlarge their horizon to a magnificent extent; to lavish upon them education in every shape; to set them an example of labor, and never of indolence; to lessen the weight of the individual burden by increasing the notion of the universal aim; to limit poverty without limiting wealth; to create vast fields of public and popular activity; to have, like Briareus, a hundred hands to stretch out on all sides to the crushed and the weak; to employ the collective power in the grand task of opening workshops for every arm, schools for every aptitude, and laboratories for every intellect; to increase wages, diminish toil, and balance the debit and credit--that is to say, proportion enjoyment to effort, and supply to demand; in a word, to evolve from the social machine, on behalf of those who suffer and those who are ignorant, more light and more comfort, is (and sympathetic souls must not forget it) the first of brotherly obligations, and (let egotistic hearts learn the fact) the first of political necessities.
Victor Hugo (Les Misérables)
Your soul may be more evolved than you are right now. If a kid fails tenth grade, do you make him repeat grades K through nine?” “No, I guess not.” “No, you just make him start over at the beginning of tenth grade. Well, it’s the same with souls. They only ascend. A person gets a soul when they can carry it to the next level, when they are ready to learn the next lesson.
Christopher Moore (A Dirty Job (Grim Reaper, #1))
Online content and new media are changing our communities and changing the demand for and accessibility of that content. The discussion of representation is one that has been repeated over and over again, and the solution has always been that it’s up to us to support, promote, and create the images that we want to see. Ten years ago, making that suggestion would have required way more work than it does now, and my love of taking shortcuts probably wouldn’t allow me to make any dents on that front. But with ever-evolving, new accessible technologies, there are so many opportunities to reclaim our images. There’s no excuse not to, and I’ve never felt more purposeful in my quest to change the landscape of television.
Issa Rae (The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl)
These changes are all fundamentally Darwinian. This point is worth repeating: taking any fast or instant evolutionary shifts as a refutation of the slow, gradual changes we associate with Darwin's vision is a fatal mistake because these quick shifts are still powered by gradualism. The woodrats might have been able to resist creosote by picking up the right bacteria, but those strains had to evolve the ability to break the insecticide on their own. Form their perspective, evolution proceeded through the usual stepwise way; from the host's perspective, everything happened in a flash. That is the power of symbiosis: it allows gradual mutations in microbes to produce instant mutations in hosts. We can let bacteria do the slow work for us, and then quickly change ourselves by associating with them. And if these alliances are beneficial enough, they can spread with blinding speed.
Ed Yong (I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life)
Ultimately...woman's equality is not derived from any theory of human nature but rather from concepts of justice, equality and the integrity of the individual based on philosophical and political principles that we have evolved since the Enlightenment. "There is, in fact, no incompatibility between the principles of feminism and the possibility that men and women are not psychologically identical,' writes Pinker. 'To repeat: equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group.
Jack Holland (Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice)
The story of the rapper and the story of the hustler are like rap itself, two kinds of rhythm working together, having a conversation with each other, doing more together than they could do apart. It's been said that the thing that makes rap special, that makes it different both from pop music and from written poetry, is that it's built around two kinds of rhythm. The first kind of rhythm is the meter. In poetry, the meter is abstract, but in rap, the meter is something you literally hear: it's the beat. The beat in a song never stops, it never varies. No matter what other sounds are on the track, even if it's a Timbaland production with all kinds of offbeat fills and electronics, a rap song is usually built bar by bar, four-beat measure by four-beat measure. It's like time itself, ticking off relentlessly in a rhythm that never varies and never stops. When you think about it like that, you realize the beat is everywhere, you just have to tap into it. You can bang it out on a project wall or an 808 drum machine or just use your hands. You can beatbox it with your mouth. But the beat is only one half of a rap song's rhythm. The other is the flow. When a rapper jumps on a beat, he adds his own rhythm. Sometimes you stay in the pocket of the beat and just let the rhymes land on the square so that the beat and flow become one. But sometimes the flow cops up the beat, breaks the beat into smaller units, forces in multiple syllables and repeated sounds and internal rhymes, or hangs a drunken leg over the last bap and keeps going, sneaks out of that bitch. The flow isn't like time, it's like life. It's like a heartbeat or the way you breathe, it can jump, speed up, slow down, stop, or pound right through like a machine. If the beat is time, flow is what we do with that time, how we live through it. The beat is everywhere, but every life has to find its own flow. Just like beats and flows work together, rapping and hustling, for me at least, live through each other. Those early raps were beautiful in their way and a whole generation of us felt represented for the first time when we heard them. But there's a reason the culture evolved beyond that playful, partying lyrical style. Even when we recognized the voices, and recognized the style, and even personally knew the cats who were on the records, the content didn't always reflect the lives we were leading. There was a distance between what was becoming rap's signature style - the relentlessness, the swagger, the complex wordplay - and the substance of the songs. The culture had to go somewhere else to grow. It had to come home.
Jay-Z (Decoded)
I believe that everything that happens comes about because of cause-effect relationships that repeat and evolve over time.
Ray Dalio (Principles: Life and Work)
To evolve you must dissolve and to dissolve you must evolve. They happen instantaneously. On which will you place your focus and energy?
Philip Agrios (Life's One Law: Nature's Blueprint for Repeatable Success in Life and Business)
it was through a process of repeated blasphemy that Christians and Jews evolved and grew into modernity. That is what art did. That is what science did. And yes, that is what irreverent satire did. The
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now)
The perspective changes completely when the sense of the religiousness of the Cosmos becomes lost. This is what occurs when, in certain more highly evolved societies, the intellectual élites progressively detach themselves from the patterns of the traditional religion. Periodical sanctification of cosmic time then proves useless and without meaning. The gods are no longer accessible through the cosmic rhythms. The religious meaning of the repetition of paradigmatic gestures is forgotten. But repetition emptied of its religious content necessarily leads to a pessimistic vision of existence. When it is no longer a vehicle for reintegrating a primordial situation, and hence for recovering the mysterious presence of the gods, that is, when it is desacralized, cyclic time becomes terrifying; it is seen as a circle forever turning on itself, repeating itself to infinity.
Mircea Eliade (The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion)
It bears repeating: there is no single way to live your life; there is no single career path; there is no perfect way to build your career. There is only evolving it, and it’s up to you if you choose to do that in a way that brings you delight.
Beth Kempton (Wabi Sabi: Japanese Wisdom for a Perfectly Imperfect Life)
The first step off this downward spiral is to acknowledge these bad feelings as natural. When women feel this way, our society has sympathy, and Oprah gives them cars. But when men feel this way, our society demonizes these feelings as signs of weakness, amplifying the shame and self-judgment, repeating the macho advice to “suck it up” and “get over it.” This bullshit makes the problem worse. It’s impossible to pull yourself out of depression by your bootstraps when all you want to do is hang yourself with them. Bad advice can’t fix bad feelings, and neither can ignoring those feelings. Don’t try to push them away or pretend they’re not there. These feelings evolved to protect us from harm, like our fight-or-flight responses.
Tucker Max (Mate: Become the Man Women Want)
A well-designed life is a life that is generative—it is constantly creative, productive, changing, evolving, and there is always the possibility of surprise. You get out of it more than you put in. There is a lot more than “lather, rinse, repeat” in a well-designed life. How
Bill Burnett (Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life)
Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: ‘You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being molded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.
Doris Lessing
Evolution endowed us with intuition only for those aspects of physics that had survival value for our distant ancestors, such as the parabolic orbits of flying rocks (explaining our penchant for baseball). A cavewoman thinking too hard about what matter is ultimately made of might fail to notice the tiger sneaking up behind and get cleaned right out of the gene pool. Darwin’s theory thus makes the testable prediction that whenever we use technology to glimpse reality beyond the human scale, our evolved intuition should break down. We’ve repeatedly tested this prediction, and the results overwhelmingly support Darwin. At high speeds, Einstein realized that time slows down, and curmudgeons on the Swedish Nobel committee found this so weird that they refused to give him the Nobel Prize for his relativity theory. At low temperatures, liquid helium can flow upward. At high temperatures, colliding particles change identity; to me, an electron colliding with a positron and turning into a Z-boson feels about as intuitive as two colliding cars turning into a cruise ship. On microscopic scales, particles schizophrenically appear in two places at once, leading to the quantum conundrums mentioned above. On astronomically large scales… weirdness strikes again: if you intuitively understand all aspects of black holes [then you] should immediately put down this book and publish your findings before someone scoops you on the Nobel Prize for quantum gravity… [also,] the leading theory for what happened [in the early universe] suggests that space isn’t merely really really big, but actually infinite, containing infinitely many exact copies of you, and even more near-copies living out every possible variant of your life in two different types of parallel universes.
Max Tegmark (Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality)
I am an evolutionist. I believe my great backyard Sphexes have evolved like other creatures. But watching them in the October light as one circles my head in curiosity, I can only repeat my dictum softly: in the world there is nothing to explain the world. Nothing to explain the necessity of life, nothing to explain the hunger of the elements to become life, nothing to explain why the stolid realm of rock and soil and mineral should diversify itself into beauty, terror, and uncertainty. To bring organic novelty into existence, to create pain, injustice, joy, demands more than we can discern in the nature that we analyze so completely. Worship, then, like the Maya, the unknown zero, the procession of the time-bearing gods. The equation that can explain why a mere Sphex wasp contains in its minute head the ganglionic centers of its prey has still to be written. In the world there is nothing below a certain depth that is truly explanatory. It is as if matter dreamed and muttered in its sleep. But why, and for what reason it dreams, there is no evidence.
Loren Eiseley (All the Strange Hours: The Excavation of a Life)
When I roll my eyes, she just shakes her head like I couldn't possibly understand how important all this stuff is. And she's right - I don't. I don't think prancing around in short skirts repeating stupid rhymes, flashing their underwear to cheer on boys without doing so much as a cartwheel. It's the twenty-first century - shouldn't we be more evolved than this?
Louise Rozett (Confessions of an Angry Girl (Confessions, #1))
We are a species which is naturally moved by curiosity, the only one left of a group of species (the genus Homo) made up of a dozen equally curious species. The other species in the group have already become extinct; some, like the Neanderthals, quite recently, roughly thirty thousand years ago. It is group of species which evolved in Africa, akin to the hierarchical and quarrelsome chimpanzees -- and even more closely akin to the bonobos, the small, peaceful, cheerfully egalitarian and promiscuous type of chimps. A group of species which repeatedly went out of Africa in order to explore new worlds, and went far: as far, eventually, as Patagonia -- and as far, eventually, as the moon. It is not against our nature to be curious: it is in our nature to be so.
Carlo Rovelli (Seven Brief Lessons on Physics)
The golden (logarithmic) spiral. The golden rectangle is formed by two sides comprised of the golden ratio. Portioning off a square within the golden rectangle leaves a smaller golden rectangle, a pattern that can be repeated ad infinitum. Connecting the points of the successively smaller squares gives the golden spiral found in nautilus shells, rams’ horns, whirlpools, and galaxies.
Anjan Chatterjee (The Aesthetic Brain: How We Evolved to Desire Beauty and Enjoy Art)
Neural systems have evolved to be especially sensitive to novelty, since new experiences usually signal either danger or opportunity. One of the most important characteristics of both memory, neural tissue, and of development, then, is that they all change with patterned, repetitive activity. So, the systems in your brain that get repeatedly activated will change, and the systems in your brain that don’t get activated won’t change.
Bruce D. Perry (The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook)
On a dangerous seacoast where shipwrecks often occur, there was once a crude little life-saving station. The building was just a hut, and there was only one boat. But the few devoted members kept a constant watch over the sea, and with no thought for themselves went out day and night tirelessly searching for the lost. Some of those who were saved, and various others in the surrounding area, wanted to become associated with the station and give their time and money and effort for the support of its work. New boats were bought and new crews trained. The little life-saving station grew. Some of the members of the life-saving were unhappy that the building was so crude and poorly equipped. They felt that a more comfortable place should be provided as the first refuge of those saved from the sea. They replaced the emergency cots with beds and put better furniture in the enlarged building. Now the life-saving station became a popular gathering place for its members, and they decorated it as sort of a club. Fewer members were now interested in going to sea on life-saving missions, so they hired lifeboat crews to do this work. The life-saving motif still prevailed in this club`s decoration, and there was a liturgical lifeboat in the room where the club initiations were held. About this time a large ship was wrecked off the coast, and the hired crews brought in boatloads of cold, wet and half-drowned people. They were dirty and sick and some had black skin and some had yellow skin. The beautiful new club was in chaos. So the property committee immediately had a shower house built outside the club where victims of shipwrecks could be cleaned up before coming inside. At the next meeting, there was a split in the club membership. Most of the members wanted to stop the club`s life-saving activities as being unpleasant and a hindrance to the normal social life of the club. Some members insisted upon life-saving as their primary purpose and pointed out that they were still called a life-saving station. But they were finally voted down and told that if they wanted to save lives of all the various kinds of people who were shipwrecked in those waters, they could begin their own life-saving station down the coast. So they did just that. As the years went by, the new station experienced the same changes that had occurred in the old. It evolved into a club, and yet another `spin-off` life saving station was founded. History continued to repeat itself, and if you visit the sea coast today, you will find a number of exclusive clubs along the shore. Shipwrecks are frequent in those waters, but most of the people drown.
Ross Paterson (The Antioch Factor: The Hidden Message of the Book of Acts)
If I may be allowed to use a simile, creation and  creator are two lines, without beginning and without end, running parallel to each other. God is the ever active providence, by whose power systems after systems are being evolved out of chaos, made to run for a time and again destroyed. This is what the Brâhmin boy repeats every day: “The sun and the moon, the Lord created like the suns and moons of previous cycles.” And this agrees with modern science.
Swami Vivekananda (Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda)
At this time of life one has already been wounded more than once by the darts of love; it no longer evolves by itself, obeying its own incomprehensible and fatal laws, before our passive and astonished hearts. We come to its aid, we falsify it by memory and by suggestion. Recognising one of its symptoms, we remember and re-create the rest. Since we know its song, which is engraved on our hearts in its entirety, there is no need for a woman to repeat the opening strains—filled with the admiration which beauty inspires—for us to remember what follows.
Marcel Proust (Swann's Way)
Now imagine if, instead of accidentally leaving open a loophole, the hackers behind WannaCry had designed the program to systematically learn about its own vulnerabilities and repeatedly patch them. Imagine if, as it attacked, the program evolved to exploit further weaknesses. Imagine that it then started moving through every hospital, every office, every home, constantly mutating, learning. It could hit life-support systems, military infrastructure, transport signaling, the energy grid, financial databases. As it spread, imagine the program learning to detect and stop further attempts to shut it down. A weapon like this is on the
Mustafa Suleyman (The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma)
perhaps the most astonishing feature of multicellularity is that it evolved independently, and in multiple different species, not just once, but many, many times. It is as if the drive to become multicellular was so forceful and pervasive that evolution leapt over the fence again and again. Genetic evidence suggests this incontrovertibly. Collective existence—above isolation—was so selectively advantageous that the forces of natural selection gravitated repeatedly toward the collective. The transformation from single cells into multicellularity was, as the evolutionary biologists Richard Grosberg and Richard Strathmann wrote, a “minor major transition.
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human)
From this line of reasoning, I concluded that only the material that is clearly and visibly part of a dream should be used in interpreting it. The dream has its own limitation. Its specific form itself tells us what belongs to it and what leads away from it. While “free” association lures one away from that material in a kind of zigzag line, the method I evolved is more like a circumambulation whose center is the dream picture. I work all around the dream picture and disregard every attempt that the dreamer makes to break away from it. Time and time again, in my professional work, I have had to repeat the words: “Let’s get back to your dream. What does the dream say?
C.G. Jung (Man and His Symbols)
Our evolution depends on our memory. If we keep forgetting the mistakes of the past, only to keep repeating them, then we will never change. Humanity will never move forward, spiritually or morally, to become superior beings. We must apply the wisdom of our forefathers and the lessons gained from their experiences to today's decision-making. We should be intellectually smarter, not the opposite. We should be wiser, not the opposite. It is time for us to really examine and understand why certain causes in the past have produced major negative effects. This is the only way we can prevent repeating the same mistakes in our present and future. It is the only way we will evolve.
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
The individuals in a cooperative social group cannot afford to tolerate repeated defections by selfish “free riders,” such as those who hoard food or shirk responsibility for the common defense. Any group too tolerant of defectors would be subsidizing them at its own expense, which would amount eventually to collective suicide. Organisms that temporarily forsake immediate personal advantage in the expectation of equivalent near-term reciprocation from nonkin (“reciprocal altruism”; Trivers 1971) or deferred and roundabout forms of longterm reciprocation through third parties (“indirect reciprocity”; Alexander 1987) must therefore evolve ways of reliably discriminating between a cooperator and a defector.
Scott Atran (In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (Evolution and Cognition))
So can you exercise too much? Perhaps at extreme levels, and most certainly if you are sick with a serious infection or injured and need to recover. You also increase your risk of musculoskeletal injuries if you haven’t adapted your bones, muscles, and other tissues to handle the stresses of repeated high forces of Olympic-level weight lifting, playing five sets of tennis a day, running marathons, or overdoing some other sport that obsesses you. In other respects, the negative effects of too much exercise appear to be ridiculously less than the negative effects of too little. As my wife points out, the biggest risk of exercising too much is ruining your marriage, to which I would add that the biggest risk of exercising too little is not being around
Daniel E. Lieberman (Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding)
But at the age, already a little disillusioned, which Swann was approaching, at which one knows how to content oneself with being in love for the pleasure of it without requiring too much reciprocity, this closeness of two hearts, if it is no longer, as it was in one’s earliest youth, the goal toward which love necessarily tends, still remains linked to it by an association of ideas so strong that it may become the cause of love, if it occurs first. At an earlier time one dreamed of possessing the heart of the woman with whom one was in love; later, to feel that one possesses a woman’s heart may be enough to make one fall in love with her. And so, at an age when it would seem, since what one seeks most of all in love is subjective pleasure, that the enjoyment of a woman’s beauty should play the largest part in it, love may come into being—love of the most physical kind—without there having been, underlying it, any previous desire. At this time of life, one has already been wounded many times by love; it no longer evolves solely in accordance with its own unknown and inevitable laws, before our astonished and passive heart. We come to its aid, we distort it with memory, with suggestion. Recognizing one of its symptoms, we recall and revive the others. Since we know its song, engraved in us in its entirety, we do not need a woman to repeat the beginning of it—filled with the admiration that beauty inspires—in order to find out what comes after. And if she begins in the middle—where the two hearts come together, where it sings of living only for each other—we are accustomed enough to this music to join our partner right away in the passage where she is waiting for us.
Marcel Proust (Du côté de chez Swann (À la recherche du temps perdu, #1))
In 1938, blues musician Lead Belly sang a song he wrote about “the Scottsboro boys,” a group of Black teenagers who were sent to jail after being falsely accused of raping two white women on a train (one of the women later admitted it was a made-up charge). After the song, Lead Belly talked about the case and advised fellow Black Americans “to stay woke—keep their eyes open.” Stay woke. The term has been a part of the Black American lexicon for a very long time. In more recent years, the term has evolved from the way Lead Belly was using it—warning Black people to stay alert to dangerous situations that might arise—to a broader meaning about staying aware of racist systems of oppression. After the release of Erykah Badu’s 2007 song Master Teacher, with a chorus that repeated the line “I stay woke,” the term exploded into the mainstream.
Tim Urban (What's Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies)
The law isn’t supposed to be about unspoken excuses and behind-the-scenes calculations. The beauty of the system is that judges and juries are allowed to consider only what is seen and heard in open court. In between the white lines of this arena, it’s all supposed to make sense. This is where we all get to be equal again. In the defendant’s chair, rich and poor ride the same roller coaster, face the same music. Case has to match case. Sentence should match sentence. But they don’t match anymore. They probably never did, and probably it was never even close. But at least there was the illusion of it. What’s happened now, in this new era of settlements and non prosecutions is that the state has formally surrendered to its own excuses. It has decided just to punt from the start and take the money which doesn’t become really wrong until it turns around the next day and decides to double down on the less-defended, flooring it all the way to trial against a welfare mom or some joker who sold a brick of dope in the projects. Repeat the same process a few million times, and that’s how the jails in American get the population they have. Even if every single person they sent to jail were guilty, the system would still be an epic fail—it’s the jurisprudential version of Pravda, where the facts int he paper might have all been true on any given day, but the lie was all in what was not said. That’s what nobody gets, that the two approaches to justice may individually make a kind of sense. but side by side they’re a dystopia, here common city courts become factories for turning poor people into prisoners, while federal prosecutors on the white-collar beat turn into overpriced garbage men, who behind closed doors quietly dispose of the sins of the rich for a fee. And it’s evolved this way over time and for a thousand reasons, so that almost nobody is aware of the whole picture, the two worlds so separate that they’re barely visible to each other. The usual political descriptors like “unfairness” and “injustice” don’t really apply. it’s more like a breakdown into madness.
Matt Taibbi
The Case of the Eyeless Fly The fruit fly has a mutant gene which is recessive, i.e., when paired with a normal gene, has no discernible effect (it will be remembered that genes operate in pairs, each gene in the pair being derived from one parent). But if two of these mutant genes are paired in the fertilised egg, the offspring will be an eyeless fly. If now a pure stock of eyeless flies is made to inbreed, then the whole stock will have only the 'eyeless' mutant gene, because no normal gene can enter the stock to bring light into their darkness. Nevertheless, within a few generations, flies appear in the inbred 'eyeless' stock with eyes that are perfectly normal. The traditional explanation of this remarkable phenomenon is that the other members of the gene-complex have been 'reshuffled and re-combined in such a way that they deputise for the missing normal eye-forming gene.' Now re-shuffling, as every poker player knows, is a randomising process. No biologist would be so perverse as to suggest that the new insect-eye evolved by pure chance, thus repeating within a few generations an evolutionary process which took hundreds of millions of years. Nor does the concept of natural selection provide the slightest help in this case. The re-combination of genes to deputise for the missing gene must have been co-ordinated according to some overall plan which includes the rules of genetic self-repair after certain types of damage by deleterious mutations. But such co-ordinative controls can only operate on levels higher than that of individual genes. Once more we are driven to the conclusion that the genetic code is not an architect's blueprint; that the gene-complex and its internal environment form a remarkably stable, closely knit, self-regulating micro-hierarchy; and that mutated genes in any of its holons are liable to cause corresponding reactions in others, co-ordinated by higher levels. This micro-hierarchy controls the pre-natal skills of the embryo, which enable it to reach its goal, regardless of the hazards it may encounter during development. But phylogeny is a sequence of ontogenies, and thus we are confronted with the profound question: is the mechanism of phylogeny also endowed with some kind of evolutionary instruction booklet? Is there a strategy of the evolutionary process comparable to the 'strategy of the genes'-to the 'directiveness' of ontogeny (as E.S. Russell has called it)?
Arthur Koestler (The Ghost in the Machine)
This is a perfect example of how a control drama interferes,” he said. “You were so aloof you didn’t allow an important coincidence to take place.” I must have appeared defensive. “It’s all right,” he said, “everyone plays a drama of one kind or another. At least now you understand how yours works.” “I don’t understand!” I said. “What exactly am I doing?” “Your way of controlling people and situations,” he explained, “in order to get energy coming your way, is to create this drama in your mind during which you withdraw and look mysterious and secretive. You tell yourself that you’re being cautious but what you’re really doing is hoping someone will be pulled into this drama and will try to figure out what’s going on with you. When someone does, you remain vague, forcing them to struggle and dig and try to discern your true feelings. “As they do so, they give you their full attention and that sends their energy to you. The longer you can keep them interested and mystified, the more energy you receive. Unfortunately, when you play aloof, your life tends to evolve very slowly because you’re repeating this same scene over and over again. If you had opened up to Rolando, your life movie would have taken off in a new and meaningful direction.
James Redfield (The Celestine Prophecy (Celestine Prophecy, #1))
We can all intellectually understand that the brain can manage and regulate many diverse functions throughout the rest of the body, but how responsible are we for the job our brain is doing as CEO of the body? Whether we like it or not, once a thought happens in the brain, the rest is history. All of the bodily reactions that occur from both our intentional or unintentional thinking unfold behind the scenes of our awareness. When you come right down to it, it is startling to realize how influential and extensive the effects of one or two conscious or unconscious thoughts can be. For example, is it possible that the seemingly unconscious thoughts that run through our mind daily and repeatedly create a cascade of chemical reactions that produce not only what we feel but also how we feel? Can we accept that the long-term effects of our habitual thinking just might be the cause of how our body moves to a state of imbalance, or what we call disease? Is it likely, moment by moment, that we train our body to be unhealthy by our repeated thoughts and reactions? What if just by thinking, we cause our internal chemistry to be bumped out of normal range so often that the body’s self-regulation system eventually redefines these abnormal states as normal, regular states? It’s a subtle process, but maybe we just never gave it that much attention until now.
Joe Dispenza (Evolve Your Brain: The Science of Changing Your Mind)
Neurons can be created in vitro by modifying the epigenesis of cnidarian cells, which suggests that the repeated evolution of functional neurons from non-neuronal cell lines cannot be too difficult to achieve. The evolvability of functional neurons is further supported by convergence on action potentials and information-transfer mechanisms in lineages for whom rapid sensory-motor mechanisms are either inaccessible or not required. For instance, action potentials have evolved in the first major origin of complex multicellularity: the green plants, some of whom, such as the carnivorous Venus flytrap, are capable of limited rapid movements. Such 'real-time' plant behaviors are made possible by action potentials that are analogous in certain ways to animal nervous systems. Mechanosensory stimulus triggers sensory hairs, which then generate a propagating action potential that initiates a rapid motor response - such as the snapping shut of two leaf lobes, resulting in the imprisonment of hapless insect prey. Though the precise biochemical mechanisms of this snapping mechanism are poorly understood, it is likely achieved by gated ion channels, which produce a flow of water or acid molecules that cause cells in the lobes to change shape, causing the lobes, which are held under tension, to snap shut. A basic memory system is also employed: to avoid snapping shut due to noise (such as raindrops), the snapping mechanism is only initiated when two stimuli separated in time by a few seconds are detected.
Russell Powell (Contingency and Convergence: Toward a Cosmic Biology of Body and Mind)
The Apocalypse gave you your time back. The time you can now use to look, to see, and to focus on your conscious process of cognitive evolution.” Master repeats the word ‘see’ in three local synonyms. Back then, they thought they all meant the same. Except, they didn’t. “The Apocalypse took your society, responsibilities, and useless recreations. Those were the distractions. Those things slow the process,” Master continues in the scene, the side of his face glowing from the daylight entering the cave. The visual details are as much as his brain retrieved from his memory. “Is this why monks hate recreation? Society?” Ruem asks—he looks just as Yuan’s memory recollected Ruem’s teenage self. “They don’t hate recreation,” Master says in the scene. “They just know they have to hate it.” “So, you like recreation?” Ruem asks in a confused tone. “Did I say I am a monk?” Master replies in the scene. “You never answer the question!” Ruem sounds annoyed. And for a moment, it makes the Monk—wrapped in the old shawl—smile as he watches his own old memory, remembering how impatient they both were before. “Fine,” Master begins. “The monks force themselves out of recreation because the rulebooks tell them to. People only follow rulebooks. But they don’t know why they should follow them. They don’t look at the true purpose of their rituals. They blindly follow, evolving neither spiritually nor physically.” “So, we should accept recreation, society?” asks Yuan’s teenage self, in the hologram scene. “Yes and No, my boy. It’s a perspective. You can find the secret from wherever you are as long as you aren’t drunk on indulgence, distracted from the One.” “Master, do you know why you wear orange cloth?” Ruem asks. “You caught me, my boy!” says Master, chuckling. “No, I don’t know. I wore it because the rulebooks told me to. Now it doesn’t matter which color I wear. No need for pointless rebellion over some uniform color!” “Because everything is the same?” Yuan’s teenage self asks. “Because everything is One.” Master’s eyes twinkle.
Misba (The High Auction (Wisdom Revolution, #1))
Although I have suggested that American culture tends to favor the side of independence over the side of inclusion (and I would extend that to Western culture in general), it is not a generalization that seems to apply uniformly to men and women in our culture. Indeed, although I have no idea why it may be, it seems to me that men tend to have more difficulty acknowledging their need for inclusion, tend to me more oriented toward differentiation, and that women tend to have more difficulty acknowledging their need for distinctness, tend to be more oriented toward inclusion. Whether this is a function of social experience throughout the lifespan, the effects of parenting anatomical (even genital) density, or some combination, I do not know. Whatever the source of this distinction between men and women, I believe it is also the case that this very distinction is to be found within any one person as well. Whatever the source of this distinction between men and women, I believe it is also the case that this very distinction is to be found within any one person as well. In this respect constructive-developmental theory revives the Jungian notion that there is a man in every woman and a woman in every man; saying so is both a consequence of considering that all of life is animated by a fundamental evolutionary ambivalence, and that 'maleness'/'femaleness' is but one of its expressions. Similarly, I believe that while Western and Eastern cultures reflect one side or the other of this ambivalence, they project the other. Western cultures tend to value independence, self-assertion, aggrandizement, personal achievement, increasing independence from the family of origin; Eastern cultures (including the American Indian) value the other pole. Cheyenne Indians asked to talk about themselves typically begin, 'My grandfather...' (Strauss, 1981); many Eastern cultures use the word 'I' to refer to a collectivity of people of which one is a part (Marriott, 1981); the Hopi do not say, 'It's a nice day,' as if one could separate oneself from the day, but say something that would have to be translated more like, 'I am in a nice day,' or 'It's nice in front, and behind, and above" (Whorf, 1956). At the same time one cannot escape the enormous hunger for community, mystical merging, or intergenerational connection that continually reappears in American culture through communalism, quasi-Eastern religions, cult phenomena, drug experience, the search for one's 'roots,' the idealization of the child, or the romantic appeal of extended families. Similarly, it seems too glib to dismiss as 'mere Westernization' the repeated expression in Eastern cultures of individualism, intergenerational autonomy, or entrepreneurialism as if these were completely imposed from without and not in any way the expression of some side of Eastern culture itself.
Robert Kegan (The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development)
MY LIFE IS a beautiful tragedy. A sad love story on an endless loop. The players may evolve and the setting may change, but it’s always the same. Love. Pain. Death. Repeat.
S.L. Jennings (Light Shadows (Dark Light, #3))
We now have our answer to the key question of how novel technologies arise. The mechanism is certainly not Darwinian; novel species in technology do not arise from the accumulation of small changes. They arise from a process, a human and often lengthy one, of linking a need with a principle (some generic use of an effect) that will satisfy it. This linkage stretches from the need itself to the base phenomenon that will be harnessed to meet it, through supporting solutions and subsolutions. And making it defines a recursive process. The process repeats until each subproblem resolves itself into one that can be physically dealt with. In the end the problem must be solved with pieces-components-that already exist (or pieces that can be created from ones that already exist). To invent something is to find it in what previously exists. We can now understand why invention varies so much. A particular case can be need-driven or phenomenon-driven; it can have a lone originator or many; its principle may be difficult to conceive of, or may have emerged naturally; translating that principle into physical components may be straightforward or may proceed in steps as crucial subproblems are resolved. But whatever their particular histories, at bottom all inventions share the same mechanism: all link a purpose with a principle that will fulfill it, and all must translate that principle into working parts.
W. Brian Arthur (The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves)
Let’s first consider how farming led to natural selection. It bears repeating that the very first farmers lived about 600 to 500 generations ago, and in most parts of the world, farming has been practiced for less than 300 generations. From an evolutionary perspective, this is not much time for lots of major evolutionary change, such as a new species evolving, but it is enough time for genes with strong effects on survival and reproduction to change their frequencies appreciably within populations. In fact, because farming so profoundly altered people’s diets, the pathogens they encountered, the work they did, and the number of children they could have, the origins of agriculture probably intensified selection on certain genes.
Daniel E. Lieberman (The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health and Disease)
TV repeatedly triggers our orienting response—the instinctive reaction to pay attention to any sudden, changing, or novel stimulus. This orienting response evolved in the species because it helps us identify potential threats and react to them. Media producers use features such as edits, cuts, zooms, pans, and sudden noises to continually trigger our orienting response. In short, they exploit basic psychological and biological mechanisms to get and keep our attention.
Douglas A. Gentile (Media Violence and Children: A Complete Guide for Parents and Professionals, 2nd Edition (ADVANCES IN APPLIED DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY))
People are innately prepared to act as members of tribes, but culture tells us how to recognize who belongs to our tribes, what schedules of aid, praise, and punishment are due to tribal fellows, and how the tribe is to deal with other tribes — allies, enemies, and clients. […] Contemporary human societies differ drastically from the societies in which our social instincts evolved. Pleistocene hunter-gatherer societies were likely comparatively small, egalitarian, and lacking in powerful institutionalized leadership. […] To evolve largescale, complex social systems, cultural evolutionary processes, driven by cultural group selection, takes advantage of whatever support these instincts offer. […] cultural evolution must cope with a psychology evolved for life in quite different sorts of societies. Appropriate larger scale institutions must regulate the constant pressure from smaller-groups (coalitions, cabals, cliques), to subvert the large-group favoring rules. To do this cultural evolution often makes use of “work arounds” — mobilizing tribal instincts for new purposes. For example, large national and international (e.g. great religions) institutions develop ideologies of symbolically marked inclusion that often fairly successfully engage the tribal instincts on a much larger scale. Military and religious organizations (e.g., Catholic Church), for example, dress recruits in identical clothing (and haircuts) loaded with symbolic markings, and then subdivide them into small groups with whom they eat and engage in long-term repeated interaction. Such work-arounds are often awkward compromises […] Complex societies are, in effect, grand natural social-psychological experiments that stringently test the limits of our innate dispositions to cooperate.
Robert Boyd, Peter J. Richerson (The Origin and Evolution of Cultures (Evolution and Cognition))
Pilate’s Admonition, is made up of tiny details, ‘trivialities a thousand times repeated’. The face of each figure ‘with so much searching, so many faults and corrections, he had evolved with its own character, each representing so much pain and pleasure, and all of them so often placed and replaced to obtain harmony’. Yet
Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)
One of the methods, called sortes virgilianae (fate as decided by the epic poet Virgil), involved opening Virgil’s Aeneid at random and interpreting the line that presented itself as direction for the course of action. You should use such method for every sticky business decision. I will repeat until I get hoarse: the ancients evolved hidden and sophisticated ways and tricks to exploit randomness. For
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder)
Goldfish Memory For decades people believed that the goldfish memory lasts only for 3 seconds. But over the years, this belief has been debunked multiple times with experiments and research. Goldfish are one of the most popular pet fish, and if you are a proud owner of a goldfish, you would be happy to know that your fish remembers you. Disproving the 3 seconds memory myth Studies show that your goldfish memory spans more than three months. In one of the studies, the scientists added a lever to the goldfish tank that dispensed food when pressed. The goldfish in the tank quickly learned to press the lever to get food. The goldfish started to come to the lever whenever they were hungry. Later the scientist changed the process and adjusted the lever to dispense food only at a particular time within a one-hour window. Soon the goldfish learned to return to the lever each day around that time when the lever dispensed food. This experiment proves that goldfish do have memories that span more than 3 seconds. In another study, the scientists used music to train the goldfish. Whenever they brought food for the goldfish, a particular piece of music would be playing. The goldfish learned to associate this music with food. Later, the scientists released the goldfish into the wild. After about five months, they played the same piece of music, and the goldfish returned to the same feeding place. The results of the above experiments would have been different if the goldfish has a 3-second memory. Are goldfish smart? The answer is yes they are! Besides having better than a 3-second memory, goldfish are also quite intelligent in their own right. They have shown an incredible ability to learn and process information. In many cases, your pet goldfish have been found to remember their owners' sound and to distinguish the one who feeds them. They are usually scared when they meet new people, and it is only after repeatedly seeing the person that they no longer fear them. There have also been instances where goldfish do complex activities like swimming through a maze or push a ball into a net. This proves that the goldfish have better memory and can perform far more complex tasks than we give them credit. Goldfish evolving over millions of years Scientists believe that the entire fish category has evolved over hundreds of years and have learned to remember where and how they can find food, what predators look like, how to stay safe, and basic survival instincts. Conclusion From all the research and studies that have been conducted, it is easy to deduce that when you keep your goldfish in a bowl with the same accessories for years, it will not provide a scintillating environment for the fish to thrive. The goldfish may not be the smartest species in the animal kingdom, but they do have a memory that is more than just 3 seconds. Hence, it is only fair that if you bring home a goldfish as a pet, give it the environment it needs to enjoy a healthy and stimulating life.
Goldfish Memory
Exactly what gives its real dignity to the figure of Lincoln is that he stands invoking a primitive first principle of the age of innocence, and holding up the tables of an ancient law, against the trend of the nineteenth century; repeating, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator, etc.,’ to a generation that was more and more disposed to say something like this: ‘We hold these truths to be probable enough for pragmatists; that all things looking like men were evolved somehow, being endowed by heredity and environment with no equal rights, but very unequal wrongs,’ and so
G.K. Chesterton (The G.K. Chesterton Collection [34 Books])
You have two choices, evolve or repeat.
Joe Mehl
it was created to allow ascending consciousnesses the ability to repeatedly experience lower densities and less-evolved timelines.
Todd R. Deviney (Expansion for Ascending Consciousness: Understanding the Universe, Consciousness, and Ascension)
neuroplasticity’, a term which takes into account the fact that the brain evolves continuously in relation to our experience, and that a particular training, such as learning a musical instrument or a sport, can bring about a profound change. Mindfulness, altruism and other basic human qualities can be cultivated in the same way. In general, if we engage repeatedly in a new activity or train in a new skill, modifications in the neuronal system of the brain can be observed within a month. What is essential, therefore, is to meditate regularly.
Matthieu Ricard (The Art of Meditation)
I may be wrong, but I still claim in Mao's defence, that in a country like China, where the shout of 'long live' has been repeated throughout several thousand years of history, a man, no matter how wise, will be unable to keep a cool head for long. When the shout turns into a kind of ritual greeting, he will ultimately come to regard it as a matter of course. And this ritual invariably transforms the man into a god; and once he has been deified, he becomes increasingly alienated from the masses, and the more he becomes alienated from them, the more he is treated like a god; a cycle which will in due course evolve into tragedy.
Yanchi Quan (Mao Zedong: Man, Not God)
The RAG [(Recombination-Activating Gene)] genes [which assist in the facilitation of V(D)J recombination] lack the introns that characterize eukaryotic genes. In this unusual feature they resemble the transposase gene of a transposon, a type of genetic element that can make and move copies of itself to different chromosomal locations. The essential components of a transposon are a transposase—an enzyme that cuts double-stranded DNA—and regions of repetitive DNA, called the terminal repeat sequences, that are recognized by the transposase. These two features allow the transposon to be excised from one location and inserted into another. The similarity of the RAG recombinase to a transposase has led to the hypothesis that the mechanism now used to rearrange immunoglobulin and T-cell receptor gene segments originated in a vertebrate ancestor with the insertion of a transposon into a gene encoding a receptor of innate immunity. The inserted transposase genes evolved to encode RAG proteins, and the terminal repeat sequences evolved to become the recombination signal sequences for the first rearranging gene segments. During this evolution, the transposase gene and the long terminal repeats of the transposon were separated and became components of different genes, both expressed specifically in lymphocytes. Today, the human RAG genes are on chromosome 11[,] and on four other chromosomes are the much-expanded sets of rearranging antigen-receptor genes.
Peter Parham (The Immune System, Fourth Edition)
When designing your life, you start with who you are (chapters 1, 2, and 3). Then you have lots of ideas (rather than wait and wait to have the idea of the century) and you try things out by doing them (chapters 4, 5, and 6), and then you make the best choice you can (chapter 8). As you do all this, including making choices that set you on one path for a number of years, you grow various aspects of your personality and identity that are nurtured and called upon by those experiences—you become more yourself. In this way, you energize a very productive cycle of growth, naturally evolving from being, to doing, to becoming. Then it all repeats, as the more-like-you version of you (your new being) takes the next step of doing, and so it goes.
Bill Burnett (Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life)
why would I, an elf, a Sage, a member of the elite, share anything with a descendant of a creature that appeared in the universe barely five million years ago, having evolved from an ape, a rat, a jackal or some other such mammal? A creature that took around a million years to discover that one can execute some sort of operation with a gnawed bone using its two hairy hands? After which it shoved the bone up its rectum and shrieked for joy?’ The elf fell silent, turning and fixing his gaze on his painting. ‘Why indeed,’ he repeated, ‘do you dare to think I would share any knowledge at all with you, human? Tell me!
Andrzej Sapkowski (The Tower of the Swallow (The Witcher, #6))
What one needs is a quantum mechanical model with a wave function that describes not only various systems under study but also something representing a conscious observer. With such a model, one would try to show that, as a result of repeated interactions of the observer with individual systems, the wave function of the combined system evolves with certainty to a final wave function, in which the observer has become convinced that the probabilities of the individual measurements are what are prescribed in the Copenhagen interpretation.
Steven Weinberg (Dreams of a Final Theory: The Scientist's Search for the Ultimate Laws of Nature)
Our questioning—again echoing Ghazali—of the likely impact of development efforts (“prosperity,” in his formula) also flew in the face of received wisdom. For years, the notion had prevailed that the best way to sway Afghan “hearts and minds” was by giving away stuff: blankets, bags of wheat, wells for drinking water, schoolrooms. Among the conditions fueling extremism, commentators and policy makers often repeat, is economic malaise, aggravated by demographic shifts or such externals as drought. Foreign assistance is seen as a palliative to those ills. Evolving U.S. military doctrine even referred to “money as a weapon system.” But examination of extremist leaders’ sociological backgrounds casts doubt on these presumptions. Studies by such analysts as Andrew Wilder have found that in Afghanistan, infusions of development resources often exacerbated local conflict rather than reducing it, by providing new prizes for opposing groups to fight over.6
Sarah Chayes (Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security)
For in the ever-repeated origination of highly organized individuals from an infinitesimal germ, the working-out of a prearranged plan of growth and development seems obvious. Thus the very idea of “development” which the facts of reproduction suggested stood in the way of applying to the living kingdom the same categories of genesis that were applied on mechanistic principles to reality at large. Indeed, the term “evolution” denoted originally just this phenomenon of individual genesis, and by no means the genesis of species. On the contrary, “evolution” in its literally sense presupposes the existence of the species, because it is precisely this which, in the person of parent individual, provides the prearranged plan to be “evolved” in every given case of generation. What evolves is not the model itself but its re-embodiment in each generation from germ to maturity: what evolves was involved in the germ, its potency there derived from its act in the progenitor. In terms of cause-effect relation, then, the parent accounts not only for its offspring’s existence, but also for its offspring’s form by its own possession of this selfsame form. This is a pattern very different from mechanistic chain of cause and effect and strongly suggest the operation of a causa formalis in addition to a causa effciens, or the existence of a substantial form, which were otherwise banned from the whole system of natural explanation. In short, the very concept of development was opposed to that of mechanics and still implied some version of other of classic ontology.
Hans Jonas (The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology)
What is a life mate?” “If you would care to sit down, I’ll explain,” Anders said quietly. Valerie sat down. She could hardly do anything else. She had to know what a life mate was. She suspected it was important. Vital, even. She just didn’t know why. “Mind reading is one of the skills that evolved through the nanos. Immortals can read most immortals younger than them, and occasionally even immortals older than themselves. But they can read all mortals unless they are mentally ill or suffering some sort of ailment like a tumor that might block the part of the brain where thoughts are processed.” “I’m not crazy,” Valerie denied, eyes wide. “No, of course not,” he said quickly. “Then I have a tumor?” she asked with horror. The news was devastating. Dear God, she was only thirty. Too young to— “Breathe,” Anders repeated, capturing her hands and chafing them between both of his. “You don’t have a tumor, Valerie. That’s not why I can’t read you. Leigh, Lucian, and—hell, everyone who has encountered you—has been able to read your thoughts like a book. You are not ill.” “Oh, good,” Valerie let her breath out on a sigh and then frowned. Really it wasn’t that good. While she was glad she wasn’t ill, it was rather disturbing to think every one she’d met since waking in Leigh and Lucian’s house had been able to read her mind. Pushing that worry away for now, she asked, “Why can’t you read my mind?” “Because you’re my—” “Life mate,” she finished for him, recalling his saying that earlier. “Yes. And a life mate is that one person, mortal or immortal, that an immortal can neither read nor control, and who cannot read or control them.” “And that makes them a life mate?” Valerie asked uncertainly. Anders nodded. “It is a special gift to us. With the rest of the world we have to constantly guard our minds to prevent our thoughts from being read, which can be exhausting. It’s that, or restrict ourselves to a solitary existence.” He paused and then said, “But with a life mate we don’t have to do that. We can let our guards down around them, and just enjoy the company of another without fear that they’ll read our thoughts.” “And I’m that for you?” “Yes, you are,” Anders assured her as if it was a good thing.
Lynsay Sands (Immortal Ever After (Argeneau, #18))
Lessons are repeated until they are learned;” it clearly defines that each hurdle may be treated as opportunities to learn from. Once we get what the present situation is teaching us we evolve and change and consciously make decisions not to repeat them.
Lewena Bayer (The 30% Solution)
One is everywhere and in everything if awaken to cosmic realisation of truth of oneness But "one" isn't here, anywhere or in anything. To know and experience Truth. One must be lost completely in whatever one does and be whatever what is. Desirelessness take you beyond the infinite consciousness and dissolve one into Cosmic oneness to liberation. Anyone can know from books, text and words of other, nothing is truth until it come from within you. One must die to attain the Truth and be free from the illusion of separation into Cosmic oneness. Don't let demon take control over your mind, because it's his habit of playing with mind. Losses are always known, found, and realised after the storm has been passed. Learn from your anger and mistakes rather than crying over the destruction you caused. If you are Wise, Mistakes will be your Greatest Teacher, if foolish it will be your greatest defeat. But the foolish who will learn from defeat will even achieve more. Learn from your mistakes and put them in use before Life does. Universe have a bad habit of repeating worse situations for same mistakes to one who doesn't realise and learn from it. Be Grateful for the lessons you learned from your mistakes. It's has helped your consciousness grow and evolve. You can't control everything, everything is in control. By controlling Nothing, you are in complete control.
Harsh Ranga Neo
New York Times article from March 8, 1953, titled “Looking Back Two Billion Years.” “Obviously,” Edmond said, “this experiment raised some eyebrows. The implications could have been earth-shattering, especially for the religious world. If life magically appeared inside this test tube, we would know conclusively that the laws of chemistry alone are indeed enough to create life. We would no longer require a supernatural being to reach down from heaven and bestow upon us the spark of Creation. We would understand that life simply happens…as an inevitable by-product of the laws of nature. More importantly, we would have to conclude that because life spontaneously appeared here on earth, it almost certainly did the same thing elsewhere in the cosmos, meaning: man is not unique; man is not at the center of God’s universe; and man is not alone in the universe.” Edmond exhaled. “However, as many of you may know, the Miller-Urey experiment failed. It produced a few amino acids, but nothing even closely resembling life. The chemists tried repeatedly, using different combinations of ingredients, different heat patterns, but nothing worked. It seemed that life—as the faithful had long believed—required divine intervention. Miller and Urey eventually abandoned their experiments. The religious community breathed a sigh of relief, and the scientific community went back to the drawing board.” He paused, an amused glimmer in his eyes. “That is, until 2007…when there was an unexpected development.” Edmond now told the tale of how the forgotten Miller-Urey testing vials had been rediscovered in a closet at the University of California in San Diego after Miller’s death. Miller’s students had reanalyzed the samples using far more sensitive contemporary techniques—including liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry—and the results had been startling. Apparently, the original Miller-Urey experiment had produced many more amino acids and complex compounds than Miller had been able to measure at the time. The new analysis of the vials even identified several important nucleobases—the building blocks of RNA, and perhaps eventually…DNA. “It was an astounding science story,” Edmond concluded, “relegitimizing the notion that perhaps life does simply happen…without divine intervention. It seemed the Miller-Urey experiment had indeed been working, but just needed more time to gestate. Let’s remember one key point: life evolved over billions of years, and these test tubes had been sitting in a closet for just over fifty. If the timeline of this experiment were measured in miles, it was as if our perspective were limited to only the very first inch…” He let that thought hang in the air. “Needless to say,” Edmond went on, “there was a sudden resurgence in interest surrounding the idea of creating life in a lab.” I remember that, Langdon thought. The Harvard biology faculty had thrown
Dan Brown (Origin (Robert Langdon, #5))
In using the notion of self, I am in no way suggesting that all the contents of our minds are inspected by a single central knower and owner, and even less that such an entity would reside in a single brain place. I am saying, though, that our experiences tend to have a consistent perspective, as if there were indeed an owner and knower for most, though not all, contents. I imagine this perspective to be rooted in a relatively stable, endlessly repeated biological state. The source of the stability is the predominantly invariant structure and operation of the organism, and the slowly evolving elements of autobiographical data.
António R. Damásio (Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain)
standpoint of the Constitution as it had existed until then, Lincoln’s proposed order was a fundamental violation—and pointed toward a fundamental restructuring. The Constitution had been born as a compromise. That compromise had been repeatedly updated and reaffirmed until the Civil War began. As it had evolved, the compromise Constitution protected slavery in order to preserve a union capable
Noah Feldman (The Broken Constitution: Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America)
Tesla Motors was created to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport. If we clear a path to the creation of compelling electric vehicles, but then lay intellectual property landmines behind us to inhibit others, we are acting in a manner contrary to that goal. Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology. When I started out with my first company, Zip2, I thought patents were a good thing and worked hard to obtain them. And maybe they were good long ago, but too often these days they serve merely to stifle progress, entrench the positions of giant corporations and enrich those in the legal profession, rather than the actual inventors. After Zip2, when I realized that receiving a patent really just meant that you bought a lottery ticket to a lawsuit, I avoided them whenever possible. At Tesla, however, we felt compelled to create patents out of concern that the big car companies would copy our technology and then use their massive manufacturing, sales and marketing power to overwhelm Tesla. We couldn’t have been more wrong. The unfortunate reality is the opposite: electric car programs (or programs for any vehicle that doesn’t burn hydrocarbons) at the major manufacturers are small to non-existent, constituting an average of far less than 1% of their total vehicle sales. Given that annual new vehicle production is approaching 100 million per year and the global fleet is approximately 2 billion cars, it is impossible for Tesla to build electric cars fast enough to address the carbon crisis. By the same token, it means the market is enormous. Our true competition is not the small trickle of non-Tesla electric cars being produced, but rather the enormous flood of gasoline cars pouring out of the world’s factories every day. We believe that Tesla, other companies making electric cars, and the world would all benefit from a common, rapidly-evolving technology platform. Technology leadership is not defined by patents, which history has repeatedly shown to be small protection indeed against a determined competitor, but rather by the ability of a company to attract and motivate the world’s most talented engineers. We believe that applying the open source philosophy to our patents will strengthen rather than diminish Tesla’s position in this regard.[431]
Charles Morris (Tesla: How Elon Musk and Company Made Electric Cars Cool, and Remade the Automotive and Energy Industries)
As a multi-culturalist, I play no favorites. In one sense we have evolved 72 years beyond the Christ cult, and in another sense we have evolved 90 years. As Sri Syadasti said, “All systems are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense.” (A secret Illuminati teaching holds that if you repeat that 666 times you will achieve Total Illumination, in some sense.)
Robert Anton Wilson (Cosmic Trigger III: My Life After Death)
(Post-modernism, in art and theory, evolved out of the linguistic analysis of recent semantic/semiotic philosophers, who have discovered that [1] any system of words or concepts covers part, but not all, of human experience, and that [2] social factors play a role in which systems dominate at a given time. The opposition consists mostly of Christian theologians like Jacques Maritain and C.S. Lewis, who claim the total truth remains accessible to us through Faith in the Christian mythos. More recently two blokes named Gross and Levitt, in a curious book called Higher Superstition, repeat most of the Maritainish and Lewisoid arguments for Faith in Authority and rejection of relativistic skepticism — except that Gross and Levitt believe that current mainstream science, not mainstream Christianity, contains the repository of Total Truth which skepticism should never question. More about those extremely odd birds later.)
Robert Anton Wilson (Cosmic Trigger III: My Life After Death)
Our bodies are not as evolved as we’d like to think … Our culture and food availability has shifted rapidly and significantly over the last century. We should really strive to eat as our grandparents and great-grandparents did: mostly homemade, “real” food, one large meal a day, unsweetened drinks to hydrate. Having one primary meal a day allows me to focus on quality and gives me freedom the rest of the day.
Gin Stephens (Fast. Feast. Repeat.: The Comprehensive Guide to Delay, Don't Deny® Intermittent Fasting--Including the 28-Day FAST Start)
This power to shame, silence, and muscle concessions from the larger society on the basis of past victimization became the new “black power.” Then, as this power supported the next generation of civil rights leaders, it evolved into what we call today “the race card.” But back on that hot August night I only felt a weight drop from my shoulders as I began to understand that my country was now repentant before me. I now possessed a separate power that it could only appeal to, appease, or placate. Now America had to prove itself to me. I have already discussed the narcotic effect of all this. This was the inflation that, months later, would lead me to spill cigarette ashes on Dr. McCabe’s fine carpet. But far more important, this great infusion of moral authority gave blacks the power to imprint the national consciousness with a profound new edict, an unwritten law more enforceable than many actual laws: that no black problem—whether high crime rates, poor academic performance, or high illegitimacy rates—could be defined as largely a black responsibility, because it was an injustice to make victims responsible for their own problems. To do so would be to “blame the victim,” thereby repeating his victimization.
Shelby Steele (White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era)
Flight is a good trick, and has evolved repeatedly in distantly related creatures, but it has also evolved many times over within the same groups of creatures.
Adam Rutherford (The Book of Humans: A Brief History of Culture, Sex, War, and the Evolution of Us: How Homo sapiens Became Nature’s Most Paradoxical Creature―A New Evolutionary History)
We are a species which is naturally moved by curiosity, the only one left of a group of species (the genus Homo) made up of a dozen equally curious species. The other species in the group have already become extinct; some, like the Neanderthals, quite recently, roughly thirty thousand years ago. It is a group of species which evolved in Africa, a kin to the hierarchical and quarrelsome chimpanzees - and even more closely akin to the bonobos, the small, peaceful, cheerfully egalitarian and promiscuous type of chimps. A group of species which repeatedly went out of Africa in order to explore new worlds, and went far: as far, eventually, as Patagonia - and as far, eventually, as the moon.
Carlo Rovelli (Seven Brief Lessons on Physics)
No believer, no matter how sincere, could possibly write the Divine Comedy today, even if he possessed a talent equal to Dante’s. Visions and symbols do not have the immediate and overwhelming reality for us that they had for the medieval poet. In the Divine Comedy the whole of nature is merely a canvas upon which the religious symbol and image are painted. Western man has spent more than five hundred years – half a millennium – in stripping nature of these projections and turning it into a realm of neutral objects which his science may control. Thus it could hardly be expected that the religious image would have the same force for us as it did for Dante. This is simply a psychic fact within human history; psychic facts have just as much historical validity as the facts that we now, unlike the man of Dante's time, travel in airplanes and work in factories regulated by computing machines. A great work of art can never be repeated – the history of art shows us time and again that literal imitation leads to pastiche – because it springs from the human soul, which evolves like everything else in nature. This point must be insisted upon, contrary to the view of some of our more enthusiastic medievalists who picture the psychic containment of medieval man as a situation of human completeness to which we must return. History has never allowed man to return to the past in any total sense. And our psychological problems cannot be solved by a regression to a past state in which they had not yet been brought into being.
William Barrett (Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy)
Schore emphasized that when the caregiver is unable to help the child to regulate either a specific emotion or intense emotions in general, or – worse – that she exacerbates the dysregulation, the child will start to go into a state of hypoaroused dissociation as soon as a threat of dysregulation arises. This temporaily reduces conscious emotional pain in the child living with chronic trauma, but those who characterologically use the emotion-deadening defense of dissociation to cope with stressful interpersonal events subsequently dissociate to defend against both daily stresses, and the stress caused when implicitly held memories of trauma are triggered. In the developing brain, repeated neurological states become traits, so dissociative defense mechanisms are embedded into the core structure of the evolving personality, and become a part of who a person is, rather than what a person does. Dissociation, which appears in the first month of life, seems to be a last resort survival strategy. It represents detachment from an unbearable situation. The infant withdraws into an inner world, avoids eye contact and stares into space. Dissociation triggered by a hypoaroused state results in a constricted state of consciousness, and a void of subjectivity. Being cut off from our emotions impacts our sense of who we are as a person. Our subjective sense of self derives from our unconscious experience of bodily-based emotions and is neurologically constructed in the right brain. If we cannot connect to our bodily emotions then our sense of self is built on fragile foundations. Many who suffered early relational trauma have a disturbed sense of their bodies and of what is happening within them physiologically as well as emotionally. The interview moved along to the topic of how we can possibly master these adverse and potentially damaging relational experiences. Schore replied by explaining that the human brain remains plastic and capable of learning throughout the entire life span, and that with the right therapeutic help and intervention we can move beyond dissociation as our primary defense mechanism, and begin to regulate our emotions more appropriately. When the relationship between the therapist and the client develops enough safety, the therapeutic alliance can act as a growth-facilitating environment that offers a corrective emotional experience via “rewiring” the right brain and associated neurocircuits.
Eva Rass (The Allan Schore Reader: Setting the course of development)
Chapter Summary The 4th Law of Behavior Change is make it satisfying. We are more likely to repeat a behavior when the experience is satisfying. The human brain evolved to prioritize immediate rewards over delayed rewards. The Cardinal Rule of Behavior Change: What is immediately rewarded is repeated. What is immediately punished is avoided. To get a habit to stick you need to feel immediately successful—even if it’s in a small way. The first three laws of behavior change—make it obvious, make it attractive, and make it easy—increase the odds that a behavior will be performed this time. The fourth law of behavior change—make it satisfying—increases the odds that a behavior will be repeated next time.
James Clear (Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones)
Teaching our kids to be like the ocean… The ocean does not apologize for its ever-evolving state, It does not ask for approval when its surface is crystal glass, It does not seek to facilitate the comfort of everyone as it honors its tides, It does not feel the need to explain its unexplored depths, It will not become less when it swells and dominates within the storm in order to make others feel like they are more, It asks not if it is ‘too much’ as its waves crash and break powerfully on the surface, It does not apologize as it erodes away the old to make way for the new, It demands no approval as it penetrates through the cracks to expand its reach, It knows that a drop, relentlessly repeated over time, can carve pathways through rock, It expresses its raw beauty in every creation that it sets forth onto the world, The ocean is vast, powerful, rich with life, and is forever and unapologetically changing. Be the whole expansive ocean of who you are… forever changing, forever in motion, impossible to contain, and a force to be reckoned with.
Cathy Domoney
Our species has co-evolved alongside many others to which we were in contact, especially through scavenging, hunting, and then animal husbandry, all of which would have exposed us to novel pathogens and zoonotic diseases. As a species, we had to adapt to these new pathogens without the benefits of modern medicine. The newly emerging diseases of recent decades, while novel in themselves, are but a repeat of patterns which humans have survived over several millennia.
Kimberly A. Plomp (Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach)
You can keep repeating by doing the same thing, the easy thing, or you can do what's hard and evolve.
Maisie Kitton (Opium)
Accordingly, separation is an indispensable component of character building, of the process of becoming a person that I have described in this book, in the sense that our identity by necessity reflects the history of our losses. I would in fact go so far as to propose that we cannot evolve as creatures of psychic strength and versatility without repeated experiences of loss—that although our inner lives are obviously fostered by our various interpersonal relationships, the loss of such relationships may be equally important in shaping our individuality. This argument goes further than the Lacanian proposition that subjectivity comes into being as a consequence of separation, for it implies that object loss is conducive to psychic multidimensionality.
Mari Ruti (A World of Fragile Things: Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living (SUNY Series in Psychoanalysis and Culture (Hardcover)))
Ries wrote that startups operate in an environment of “extreme uncertainty” in which it is impossible to know whether the product they have developed is one that consumers will value. “We must learn what customers really want,” he advised, “not what they say they want or what we think they should want.” The only way to do that is to “experiment.” Create a “minimum viable product,” put it in front of consumers, and see what happens. With lessons learned, change the product, ship again, and repeat the cycle. Ries called this the building phase, as multiple iterations gradually build the final product. I would call it the planning phase, as the design of the product evolves following the dictum “Try, learn, again.” Semantics aside, the only real difference is the method of testing.
Bent Flyvbjerg (How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything In Between)
If I follow a standard prescription of briskly walking thirty minutes a day, almost two extra miles, I’ll spend about a hundred extra calories per day, theoretically allowing me to shed approximately five pounds in half a year—about the reductions most studies report. If a skinny hunter-gatherer mother loses five pounds in six months, she’s in trouble, but many obese American dieters aim to lose about fifty-five pounds.39 Losing that many pounds that quickly through exercise alone would theoretically require Herculean efforts like running eight miles a day. Although far from easy, dieting is unquestionably more effective for shedding many pounds. While walking 30 minutes a day won’t lead to rapid, spectacular weight losses, an evolutionary and anthropological perspective puts a different spin on the argument that walking expends too few calories to shed excess pounds. While the commonly prescribed two-mile daily walk expends a pittance—just 4 percent—of the average person’s daily energy budget of twenty-seven hundred calories, that pittance is partly attributable to setting the exercise bar so low. It bears repeating that the standard public health recommendation is 150 minutes of moderate exercise every week. This amounts to a paltry 21 minutes a day, one-sixth the level of physical activity among nonindustrial people like the Hadza.40 Although jobs, commuting, and other obligations fill our days with necessarily sedentary activities, the average American still spends at least eight times as much time (170 minutes per day) watching television.41 It is no wonder that studies using modest exercise doses report modest weight losses.
Daniel E. Lieberman (Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding)
The gāyatrī is explained in many places in the Sanskrit literature. For instance, the Tripurā-Tāpanī-Upanishad, a fairly late work belonging to the Shākta tradition, connects this mantra with the worship of the Goddess Tripurā. She is celebrated as the great Power (Shakti) behind all manifestation. In that scripture, we learn that the Sanskrit word tat (“that”) refers to the eternal, unconditioned Absolute (brahman), the transcendental Reality out of which the world in all its many layers has evolved. Savitur (or Savitri), the Upanishad further tells us, refers to the primal power of the Goddess Tripurā, even though the Sanskrit name Savitri is a masculine word standing for the “Impeller,” that is, the Sun or Solar Spirit. Savitri must not be confused with the Goddess Savitrī, who presides over all learning but also over the mighty river by the same name that once flowed from the Himalayas to the Indian Ocean. The name Savitri derives from the verbal root su meaning “to urge, instigate, impel,” which is closely related to the second connotation of this root, namely “to extract, press.” What Savitri extracts out of himself are two closely connected things: life-giving light and warmth. Varenyam means “most excellent” or “most beautiful,” designating that which has no superior. This word qualifies the term bhargas. Bhargo (from bhargas or “splendor”) is said to be the transcendental aspect of Savitri, which strikes us with awe—a splendor that cannot be seen with human eyes but that discloses itself only to the inner vision of the great Yoga adept. Devasya (from deva) means “of God,” that is, “of Savitri.” Dhīmahi means “let us contemplate” and implies a heartfelt desire to focus the mind on the ultimate Reality through the medium of contemplation (dhī). In the Rig-Veda, the archaic term dhī stands for the later term dhyāna, which means “meditation/contemplation.” Dhiyo (from dhiyas) is the plural of dhī. Repeatedly the ancient sages fixed their minds on that One, and contemporary yogins still follow the same age-old practice. As their contemplations deepen, Savitri increasingly illuminates the mind. Yo (from yah) is simply the relative pronoun “who,” which here refers to God Savitri. Nah means “us/our” and qualifies the contemplations of the sages. Pracodayāt is derived from the verb pracodaya (meaning “to cause to be inspired”). Without Savitri, the masters of yore felt, their contemplations lacked inspiration. Only Savitri could inspire or illuminate their inner world, just as he illuminates the Earth through his radiant physical body (the visible solar orb).
Georg Feuerstein (The Deeper Dimension of Yoga: Theory and Practice)
Demonstrating for peace to promote war was nothing new. Totalitarianism always requires a tangible enemy. To the ancient Greeks, a holocaust was simply a burnt sacrifice. Khrushchev wanted to go down in history as the Soviet leader who exported communism to the American continent. In 1959 he was able to install the Castro brothers in Havana and soon my foreign intelligence service became involved in helping Cuba's new communist rulers to export revolution throughout South America. At that point it did not work. In the 1950s and 1960s most Latin Americans were poor, religious peasants who had accepted the status quo. A black version of liberation theology began growing in a few radical-leftist black churches in the US where Marxist thought is predicated on a system pf oppressor class ( white ) versus victim class ( black ) and it sees just one solution: the destruction of the enemy. In the 1950s UNESCO was perceived by many as a platform for communists to attack the West and the KGB used it to place agents around the world. Che Guevara's diaries, with an introduction by Fidel Castro, were produced by the Kremlin's dezinformatsiya machine. Changing minds is what Soviet communism was all about. Khrushchev's political necrophagy ( = blaming and condemning one's predecessor in office. It is a dangerous game. It hurts the country's national pride and it usually turns against its own user ) evolved from the Soviet tradition of sanctifying the supreme ruler. Although the communists publicly proclaimed the decisive role of the people in history, the Kremlin and its KGB believed that only the leader counted. Change the public image of the leader and you change history, I heard over and over from Khrushchev's lips. Khrushchev was certainly the most controversial Soviet to reign in the Kremlin. He unmasked Stalin's crimes, but he made political assassination a main instrument of his own foreign policy; he authored a policy of peaceful coexistence with the West but he pushed the world to the brink of nuclear war; he repaired Moscow's relationships with Yugoslavia's Tito, but he destroyed the unity of the communist world. His close association with Stalin's killings made him aware of what political crime could accomplish and gave him a taste for the simple criminal solution. His total ignorance about the civilized world, together with his irrational hatred of the "bourgeoisie" and his propensity to offend people, made him believe that disinformation and threats were the most efficient and dignified way for a Soviet leader to deal with "bourgeois" governments. As that very clever master of deception Yuri Andropov once told me, if a good piece of disinformation is repeated over and over, after a while it will take on a life of its own and will, all by itself, generate a horde or unwitting but passionate advocates. When I was working for Ceausescu, I always tried to find a way to help him reach a decision on his own, rather than telling him directly what I thought he should do about something. That way both of us were happy. From our KGB advisors, I had learned that the best way to ut over a deception was to let the target see something for himself, with his own eyes. By 1999, President Yeltsin's ill-conceived privatization had enabled a small clique of predatory insiders to plunder Russia's most valuable assets. The corruption generated by this widespread looting penetrated every corner of the country and it eventually created a Mafia-style economic system that threatened the stability of Russia itself. During the old Cold War, the KGB was a state within a state. In Putin's time, the KGB now rechristened FSB, is the state. The Soviet Union had one KGB officer for every 428 citizens. In 2004, Putin's Russia had one FSB officer for every 297 citizens.
Ion Mihai Pacepa (Disinformation)
This is not a one-off. Over 375 species of New World rats and mice evolved after they colonized South America, and rodents have evolved into over 130 species in Australia and New Guinea just a few million years after their first ancestors (presumably) rafted over on floating vegetation from Indonesia. And about eighty species of lupin plants evolved in the Andes in the last one and a half million years, after they invaded from North America. It would take only a modest 5 per cent of the world’s species to repeat the white-eye, rodent and lupin’s feats (say, generating twenty new species in different geographic locations in a million years) to double the total number of species on our planet.
Chris D. Thomas (Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction)
The stay-at-home mom had not evolved much beyond a wild animal—hunt, feed, rest, repeat. I was the busy lioness, in constant search of our next meal, while my male lion husband lounged in his cave.
Susan Walter (Good as Dead)
invited us, didn’t they? It’d be rude not to enjoy the hotel’s facilities to their fullest extent,” I repeat, mocking my grandfather. “Can you believe him?” A startled laugh escapes Lily’s lips, and I can’t help but smile too. It takes the sting out of the words that followed, the ones I won’t tell Lily about. “I can only hope that your education actually helped smarten you up, because I’m tired of my granddaughter coming second to that Windsor boy. You’re not in school anymore, Celeste. The stakes are higher now, and there’s no margin for error. At the very least, you should be able to raise our hotels to the same standard as the Windsors’.” Sometimes I wonder, would my grandfather’s endless comparisons hurt less if they didn’t result in him finding me lacking every single time? Would my hatred for Zane have evolved into what it is had it not been fueled by Grandpa’s expectations?
Catharina Maura (The Broken Vows (The Windsors, #4))
I shall go mad," she whispered to herself, perched amidst the fields of WIMBERGALE's countryside. There, in that moment, Sophia recognized that she alone held mastery over the unfolding scene. Extending her arms and palms repeatedly, she presented an enticing offering to the natural seed-eaters of the Columbidae family. This ritual persisted for hours, gradually evolving into a customary midday practice, a cherished routine that connected Sophia intimately with the rhythms of nature. -The Invisible Thread
Aya Bachir
One of the methods, called sortes virgilianae (fate as decided by the epic poet Virgil), involved opening Virgil’s Aeneid at random and interpreting the line that presented itself as direction for the course of action. You should use such method for every sticky business decision. I will repeat until I get hoarse: the ancients evolved hidden and sophisticated ways and tricks to exploit randomness.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder)
And here we are hundreds of years later and you would think the male species would have evolved beyond punishing women over miscarrying, but sadly they have not, they keep repeating history. They use the female’s greatest gift, their ability to create life as a control method. And it's time it stops; the men need to grow and evolve. And nothing does that better to a human than suffering. It's the best teacher.
Melanie Sovran Wolfe (Professor Hex vs. Texas Men: Where Women's Rights and Revenge Fantasy Meet)
The lovers They had loved, they had cried, and they had smiled, together; Now they looked at the horizon of life and wished to gather, The moments inextricably tied to their lives, Upon which their present thrives, But they think of the future, and the moments of love in it, For they do not wish to live in the future, but a future with love in it, A feeling that rises from the bottom of their hearts, And then whether they are in the present or the future, it never departs, With these inalienable feelings of love they wish to be, For a day is lifeless when in each others eyes, their own reflections they cannot see, The boy loves the woman in her, while the girl loves the man in him, And this feeling lights up their pathways of life in moments where the light of hope is dim, So, he touches her face and kisses her wherever he could, And the girl feels everything a woman in her should, Then they endlessly look at the horizon of life and watch it turn beautiful, Because now he feels her and she feels him in ways fulfilling and full, And as the evening spreads across their amorous universe, Their feelings of love across it freely traverse, She tells him her story of her heart beats, and the boy too repeats, That how for her his heart everyday beats, Loving her, feeling her, being with her, until he feels his universe exists only because of her, And then once again he embraces her and then tenderly kisses her, And they both disappear from the worldly sight, Because they have evolved into everything now, the brightness of the day, and the beautiful secrets of the night, So whenever you see two lovers looking at the horizon of their lives, Be certain, that it is in them too, in their hopes, in their desires, that their love thrives, Maybe they have disappeared, and there is no trace of theirs left for the eyes that only see, Because the most beautiful virtues are the ones you can only feel and not see, with the eyes that feel before they see, So, they have disappeared because they felt what no lover has ever felt, And it was then I saw that even the horizon of the universe in their obeisance knelt, And now they live in each other, In the eyes of the other and forever together! And I hear the universe say, “this is true love of true lovers!” Who now love each other in the night's secrets, and their twinkling covers! As I leave the scene Irma, the night covers me too, And I escape into the world that it creates exclusively for me and for you!
Javid Ahmad Tak (They Loved in 2075!)
What’s an area of your life where you continue to repeat a cycle that ends with you feeling less valuable? That, my dear, is your forbidden fruit.
Sarah Jakes Roberts (Woman Evolve: Break Up with Your Fears and Revolutionize Your Life)
Every day we're presented with two choices - Evolve or Repeat.
Unknown
Jesus called disciples—students of life—to learn from him how to live in God’s world God’s way. Constantly learning and growing and evolving and absorbing. Tomorrow is never simply a repeat of today.
Rob Bell (Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived)
Human males, too, form alliances for gaining resources such as large game, political power within the group, ways to defend against the aggression of other coalitions of men, and sexual access to women.7 The survival and reproductive benefits derived from these coalitional activities constituted tremendous selection pressure over human evolutionary history for men to form alliances with other men. Since ancestral women did not hunt large game, declare war on other tribes, or attempt to forcibly capture men from neighboring bands, they did not experience equivalent selection pressure to form coalitions. Although women do form coalitions with other women for the care of the young and for protection from sexually aggressive men, these are weakened whenever a woman leaves her kin group to live with her husband and his clan. The combination of strong coalitions among men and somewhat weaker coalitions among women, according to Barbara Smuts, may have contributed historically to men’s dominance over women.9 My view is that women’s preferences for a successful, ambitious, and resource-capable mate coevolved with men’s competitive mating strategies, which include risk taking, status striving, derogation of competitors, coalition formation, and an array of individual efforts aimed at surpassing other men on the dimensions that women desire. The intertwining of these coevolved mechanisms in men and women created the conditions for men to dominate in the domain of resources. The origins of men’s control over resources is not simply an incidental historical footnote of passing curiosity. Rather, it has a profound bearing on the present, because it reveals some of the primary causes of men’s continuing control of resources. Women today continue to want men who have resources, and they continue to reject men who lack resources. These preferences are expressed repeatedly in dozens of studies conducted on tens of thousands of individuals in scores of countries worldwide. They are expressed countless times in everyday life. In any given year, the men whom women marry earn more than men of the same age whom women do not marry. Even professionally successful women who do not really need resources from a man are reluctant to settle for a mate who is less successful than they are. Women who earn more than their husbands seek divorce more often, although this trend appears to be changing, at least within America. Men continue to compete with other men to acquire the status and resources that make them desirable to women. The forces that originally caused the resource inequality between the genders—women’s mate preferences and men’s competitive strategies—are the same forces that contribute to maintaining resource inequality today. Feminists’ and evolutionists’ conclusions converge in their implication that men’s efforts to control female sexuality lie at the core of their efforts to control women. Our evolved sexual strategies account for why this occurs, and why control of women’s sexuality is a central preoccupation of men. Over the course of human evolutionary history, men who failed to control women’s sexuality—for example, by failing to attract a mate, failing to prevent cuckoldry, or failing to retain a mate—experienced lower reproductive success than men who succeeded in controlling women’s sexuality. We come from a long and unbroken line of ancestral fathers who succeeded in obtaining mates, preventing their infidelity, and providing enough benefits to keep them from leaving. We also come from a long line of ancestral mothers who granted sexual access to men who provided beneficial resources.
David M. Buss (The Evolution Of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating)