Linearity is an artificial way of viewing the world. Real life isn’t a series of interconnected events occurring one after another like beads strung on a necklace. Life is actually a series of encount...
Like everything else I'd seen at Xymos, it was jerry-built, half-baked, concocted in a hurry to solve present problems and never a thought to the future.
Life is actually a series of encounters in which one event may change those that follow in a wholly unpredictable, even devastating way. Malcolm
Just tell us, Harding said, bent over the wound. Darwin had no idea … That life is so unbelievably complex, Malcolm said. Nobody realizes it. I mean, a single fertilized egg has a hundred thousand gen...
It’s not clear what happened. It’s not clear who did what to whom. That’s the largest category of complaints we see. So far, society’s tended to focus on the problems of the victim, not the problems o...
It's not a matter of wanting it or not, it's a matter of what you think you can accomplish. When the hunter goes out in the rain forest to seek food for his family, does he expect to control nature? N...
It was interesting that the compys only ate fresh dung,
It suggests to us that behavior of complex animals can change very rapidly, and not always for the better. It suggests that behavior can cease to be responsive to the environment, and lead to decline...
In the past, pure scientists took a snobbish view of business. They saw the pursuit of money as intellectually uninteresting, suited only to shopkeepers. And
In his view, a theory was nothing more than a substitute for experience put forth by someone who didn’t know what he was talking about.
In evolutionary theory, this is called the Red Queen phenomenon, Malcolm said. Because in Alice in Wonderland the Red Queen tells Alice she has to run as fast as she can just to stay where she is. Tha...
In a sense, he thought, all we consist of is memories. Our personalities are constructed from memories, our lives are organized around memories, our cultures are built upon the foundation of shared me...
Imaginar que todo esto puede ocurrir por azar es como imaginar que un tornado puede arremeter contra un depósito de chatarra y formar con las piezas un Boeing 747 en perfecto estado.
I call these the wet streets cause rain stories. Paper’s full of them.
Human beings are so destructive, Malcolm said. I sometimes think we’re a kind of plague, that will scrub the earth clean. We destroy things so well that I sometimes think, maybe that’s our function. M...
His management philosophy, tempered in his rain-dancing days, was always to give the project to whoever had the most to gain from success--or the most to lose from failure.
Herger said to me, Be thankful, for you are fortunate. I inquired the source of my fortune. Herger said in reply, If you have the fear of high places, then this day you shall overcome it; and so you s...
He did not want an affair with his boss. He did not even want a one-night stand. Because what always happened was that people found out, gossip at the water cooler, meaningful looks in the hallway. An...
Grant used to watch kids in museums as they stared open-mouthed at the big skeletons rising above them. He wondered what their fascination really represented. He finally decided that children liked di...
For our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behavior. We innovate new behavior to adapt.