Kate Atkinson Quotes

Those who refused to respond to the new stimulus would perish. Adapt or perish.

A cockroach can’t defeat a dinosaur. But the cockroach is better at one thing, and it has ensured its survival through the ages: Adaptation. One could adapt to the environment and the other one couldn’t.

To put it crudely but graphically, the monkey who did not have a realistic perception of the tree branch he jumped for was soon a dead monkey-and therefore did not become one of our ancestors.

Nothing stays the same, nothing remains static. Which way a thing changes depends on you.

Because the history of evolution is that life escapes all barriers. Life breaks free. Life expands to new territories. Painfully, perhaps even dangerously. But life finds a way.

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

Why did God make tigers so good at catching prey, and at the same time make prey so good at getting away from tigers? You'd think that if God wanted one thing or the other to happen he'd have engineered it rather better. Maybe he enjoyed the spectator sport?

It is a time of change,'' Sazed said. ''Perhaps it is also time to learn of other truths, other ways.

Out of the choked Devonian waters emerged sight and sound and the music that rolls invisible through the composer's brain. They are there still in the ooze along the tideline, though no one notices. The world is fixed, we say: fish in the sea, birds in the air. But in the mangrove swamps by the Niger, fish climb trees and ogle uneasy naturalists who try unsuccessfully to chase them back to the water. There are things still coming ashore.

She closes the door completely, and I crouch there. I allow myself to fall forward and rest my head on the door frame. My breath bleeds. My heartbeat drowns my ears.

Multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.

Nature has a funny way of breaking what does not bend.

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

Each of these [bacterial] species are masterpieces of evolution. Each has persisted for thousands to millions of years. Each is exquisitely adapted to the environment in which it lives, interlocked with other species to form ecosystems upon which our own lives depend in ways we have not begun even to imagine.

For a few moments, be aware of your potential for change. Whatever your present situation is, evolution and transformation are always possible. At the least, you can change your way of seeing things and then, gradually, your way of being as well.

We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a ‘higher answer’– but none exists

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

But things change, of course, and so do the ways in which people see themselves.

You know how I get angry sometimes? That's because it's the only way I can still feel. And I need to test myself, to make sure I'm really here.

The law is the survival of the fittest.... The law is not the survival of the 'better' or the 'stronger,' if we give to those words any thing like their ordinary meanings. It is the survival of those which are constitutionally fittest to thrive under the conditions in which they are placed; and very often that which, humanly speaking, is inferiority, causes the survival.

Instinct is like Nature herself - prodigiously conservative, and yet transcending her own historical conditions in her acts of creation.

Considering the way evolution works, it should not be surprising if every man has got a Don Giovanni somewhere inside him.

Evolution is the most popular way we have for dealing with change.

We cannot get to our knowledge because the world is too loud. And we tend to make it louder as we cry out in pain, pretending we are singing.

It at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed.