Adaptive Quotes & Sayings

Certainty' with respect to successful language learning and use--whether oral, written, or technologically mediated combinations--applies less and less to discrete products and more to adaptive processes. — Jay Jordan

Play is a uniquely adaptive act, not subordinate to some other adaptive act, but with a special function of its own in human experience. — Johan Huizinga

Moreover, like eyes and arms, the fundamental structures of the mind (and the informational capacities they support) aren't acquired through experience: the pioneering ethologists realized that behavior in general must be understood in the light of evolution, and this same conviction is held by the new wave of cognitive ethologists. Whatever else may be said, we expect to find that many (if not all) of the critical properties of animal minds are - like motor patterns - intrinsic traits of an organism that are adaptive consequences of evolution. — Raymond Coppinger

The adaptive immune system consists of lymphocytes and their products, such as antibodies. — Abul K. Abbas

Sensitivity to nature is not an innate attribute of indigenous peoples. It is a consequence of adaptive choices that have resulted in the development of highly specialized peripheral skills. but those choices in turn spring from a comprehensive view of nature and the universe in which man and woman are perceived as but elements inextricably linked to the whole. — Wade Davis

Developing and implementing IT governance design effectiveness and efficiency can be a multidirectional, interactive, iterative, and adaptive process. — Robert E. Davis

Most people seem to think that organisms develop adaptive traits in response to environmental change. This is bullshit. The environment changes and those who already happen to have newly adaptive traits don't get wiped out. — Peter Watts

Dissociation is adaptive: it allows relatively normal functioning for the duration of the traumatic event and then leaves a large part of the personality unaffected by the trauma. — Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

To an evolutionary psychologist, the universal extravagance of religious rituals, with their costs in time, resources, pain and privation, should suggest as vividly as a mandrills bottom that religion may be adaptive. - MAREK KOHN — Richard Dawkins

One of the extraordinary adaptive powers of our species is its ability to transmute a stray encounter into a first chapter. — Joe Hill

Organizations that empower folks further down the chain or try to get rid of the big hierarchal chains and allow decision making to happen on a more local level end up being more adaptive and resilient because there are more minds involved in the problem. — Steven Johnson

Aspects of culture can also be described as vestigial, where once-adaptive cultural adaptations become maladaptive when environments change. — Anonymous

Human judgment is notoriously fallible and perhaps seldom more so than in facile decisions that a character has no adaptive significance because we do not know the use of it. — George Gaylord Simpson

DivX Plus Streaming is adaptive bit rate streaming solutions, which means it works by detecting a user bandwidth and CPU capacity in real time and adjusting the quality of the video stream accordingly. — Alfred Amoroso

Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori). H. pylori is frequently accused of contributing to the development and progression of autoimmune disease (and is also one of the best-understood persistent infections). As mentioned in the previous section, H. pylori is a bacterium found in the upper gastrointestinal tract of approximately 50 percent of the population and is known to cause stomach ulcers in susceptible individuals. It also modulates the adaptive immune system through a very complex interaction. In fact, the interaction is so complex that acquiring H. pylori early in life prevents immune and autoimmune diseases. By contrast, acquiring H. pylori as an adult (which is more common in Western countries) increases the risk of immune dysfunction. — Sarah Ballantyne

take reason out of the interactive context in which it evolved, and nothing guarantees that it will yield adaptive results. — Hugo Mercier

Skin color is basically a measure of the local ultraviolet levels, and it is controlled by relatively minor adaptive changes in the genome. — Bill Nye

creativity isn't a luxury. It's the essence of life. It's what distinguishes us from the mush. And it's why our ancestors survived while other less adaptive critters perished. They responded to change by being creative in some way, by inventing a new answer to the chaos. — Danny Gregory

An adaptive mind has better learning capability. — Pearl Zhu

Judith Stacey - a prominent New York University professor who is in no way regarded as a fringe figure, in testifying before Congress against the Defense of Marriage Act - expressed hope that the revisionist view's triumph would give marriage "varied, creative, and adaptive contours . . . [leading some to] question the dyadic limitations of Western marriage and seek . . . small group marriages."44 In their statement "Beyond Same-Sex Marriage," more than three hundred "LGBT and allied" scholars and advocates - including prominent Ivy League professors - call for legally recognizing sexual relationships involving more than two partners.45 University of Calgary Professor Elizabeth Brake thinks that justice requires us to use legal recognition to "denormalize[] heterosexual monogamy as a way of life" and correct for "past discrimination against homosexuals, bisexuals, polygamists, and care networks."46 — Sherif Girgis

Nesse's research focuses on the evolutionary origins of depression. Why does depression exist at all? If it's stayed in our gene pool for so long, he argues, there must be some evolutionary benefit. Nesse believes that depression may be an adaptive mechanism meant to prevent us from falling victim to blind optimism - and squandering resources on the wrong goals.11 It's to our evolutionary advantage not to waste time and energy on goals we can't realistically achieve. And so when we have no clear way to make productive progress, our neurological systems default to a state of low energy ... — Jane McGonigal

When dealing with a complex adaptive system, sticking to the plan is a recipe for failure. — Anthony Mersino

We have the most flexible and adaptive economy. Making sure we sustain the ability of the American economy to perform well is really the priority of economic policy. — John W. Snow

It happens that there are a lot of people who are very talented who also happen to have a mental disorder. A lot of the mental disorders are initially things that are adaptive. Like even OCD, it's good to sort of have structure and have certain rituals but when it gets to be extreme then it becomes problematic. — H. A. Berlin

If you look at body fat, it seems to increase with age, even though your weight does not. That's a physiological fact of aging, they say. Heck it is. It is an adaptive effect of aging. — Kenneth H. Cooper

Natural selection is a pretty efficient process, so if a behavior is found widely in humans and other species, it's a better starting guess to presume it is adaptive rather than to assume it's merely dumb. — Anonymous

Instead of constantly adapting to change, why not change to be adaptive? — Fred Emery

And it has been the paleontologist- my own breed-who have been most responsible for letting ideas dominate reality: ... We paleontologist have said that the history of life supports that interpretation [gradual adaptive change], all the while knowing that it does not. — Niles Eldredge

To grasp the reality of life as it has been revealed by molecular biology, we must magnify a cell a thousand million times until it is twenty kilometers in diameter and resembles a giant airship large enough to cover a great city like London or New York. What we would then see would be an object of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design. On the surface of the cell we would see millions of openings, like the port holes of a vast space ship, opening and closing to allow a continual stream of materials to flow in and out. If we were to enter one of these openings we would find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering complexity. — Michael Denton

Congress has a deep, vested interest in its own inefficiency. — Robert A. Caro

Five rules to follow to be a great leader:
1. Be curious.
2. Serve others.
3. Be purpose oriented.
4. Be adaptive.
5. Be positive. — Debasish Mridha

Lobbyists know that a 0 percent tax rate on capital income is not, in fact, the lowest possible rate. There can be negative tax rates. There can be subsidies. There can be allowances for depreciation. Lobbyists are adaptive creatures. — Joel Achenbach

The agile movement supports individuals and teams through dedication to the concepts of self-organization, self-discipline, egalitarianism, respect for individuals, and competency. "Agile" is a socio-technical movement driven by both the desire to create a particular work environment and the belief that an adaptive environment is critical to the goal of delivering innovative products to customers. — Jim Highsmith

While everyone was screaming in italics, the babies themselves seem to have done just fine. Despite their inability to do almost anything on their own, infants are far more flexible than they get credit for: within a few obvious parameters - food, shelter, love - they are astonishingly adaptive. — Nicholas Day

A ... reason we are so-so scientists is that our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not. — Steven Pinker

Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation. Civilization, like intelligence, may serve well, serve adequately, or fail to serve its adaptive function. When civilization fails to serve, it must disintegrate unless it is acted upon by unifying internal or external forces. — Octavia E. Butler

It should be needless to add that policy needs to be somewhat flexible and adaptive since war has a way of frustrating political intentions. It is a blunt instrument, and there are many reasons why cunning plans often go awry, not the least among which is the fact of an enemy with an independent will.
It would be difficult to overstate the significance of this maxim. Maxim 3 insists both that we never forget that war is about peace (see Maxim 2), and, more pointedly, that the making of peace is likely to be more difficult than the waging of war. It is a common, and somewhat understandable, error to assume that if one takes care of the fighting in an efficient manner, and the enemy is duly humbled, somehow the subsequent peace will all but take care of itself. Indeed, to go further, it is by no means unknown for professional soldiers to be less than fascinated by the political consequences of their military efforts. — Colin S. Gray

The Philippines is strategically located and blessed with the greatest resource: its people, who are hard-working, very loyal, and very adaptive. — Benigno Aquino III

The pursuit of knowledge is an intoxicant, a lure that scientists and explorers have known from ancient times; indeed, exhilaration in the pursuit of knowledge is part of what has kept our species so adaptive. — Kay Redfield Jamison

The realizations of anarchist ideas and practices are like sociopolitical ecosystems. Local versions resemble each other, but they are endlessly adaptive and everywhere different to meet their needs in their environments. Anarchism can be adapted to meet the culture, economics, ecology, and politics of various people or communities. That's the beauty of it. — Scott Crow

It's not the strongest or the most intelligent who survive, but those most adaptive to change. Over the past 10 years, the need for, and focus on, adaptability has accelerated. — Kenneth I. Chenault

The proof given by Wright, that non-adaptive differentiation will occur in small populations owing to "drift," or the chance fixation of some new mutation or recombination, is one of the most important results of mathematical analysis applied to the facts of neo-mendelism. It gives accident as well as adaptation a place in evolution, and at one stroke explains many facts which puzzled earlier selectionists, notably the much greater degree of divergence shown by island than mainland forms, by forms in isolated lakes than in continuous river-systems. — Julian Huxley

Bad things happen. And the human brain is especially adept at making sure that we keep track of these events. This is an adaptive mechanism important for survival. — David Perlmutter

Foresight turns out to be a critical adaptive strategy for times of great stress. — Jamais Cascio

Among the things most characteristic of organisms--most distinctive of living as opposed to inorganic systems--is a sort of directedness. Their structures and activities have an adaptedness, an evident and vital usefulness to the organism. Darwin's answer and ours is to accept the common sense view...[that] the end ("telos") [is] that the individual and the species may survive. But this end is (usually) unconscious and impersonal. Naive teleology is controverted not by ignoring the obvious existence of such ends but by providing a naturalistic, materialistic explanation of the adaptive characteristics serving them. [Book review in "Science," 1959, p. 673.] — George Gaylord Simpson

Economists have the correct insight that economics is a theory of choice, the key to the story is the variety of options and centralised political control limits the options. The best recipe is adaptive efficiency coping with novel uncertainty in a non-ergodic world, the maintenance of institutions which enable trial & error experiment to occur, and an effective means of eliminating unsuccessful solutions — Douglass North

Have you given any thought to my offer?" Roberta asks her.
"I don't need to. I already gave you my answer."
"It's very noble to stand on principle and refuse an unwound spine," Roberta says. "It does, however, represent a wrongful mind-set that is neither productive nor adaptive. It's backward, actually, and it makes you part of the problem. — Neal Shusterman

there is a pervasive assumption among anthropologists that a population's long-standing beliefs and practices - their culture and their social institutions - must play a positive role in their lives or these beliefs and practices would not have persisted. Thus, it is widely thought and written that cannibalism, torture, infanticide, feuding, witchcraft, painful male initiations, female genital mutilation, cermonial rape, headhunting, and other practices that may be abhorrent to many of us must serve some useful function in the societies in which they are traditional practices. Impressed by the wisdom of biological evolution in creating such adaptive miracles as feathers for flight or protective coloration, most scholars have assumed that cultural evolution too has been guided by a process of natural selection that has produced traditional beliefs and practices that meet peoples' needs. — Robert B. Edgerton

Be attentive.
Be adaptive.
Be accommodative.
Be assertive. — Matshona Dhliwayo

Wood is an endlessly adaptive material. You can plane, chisel, saw, carve, sand, and bend it, and when the pieces are the shape you want you can use dovetail joints, tenpenny nails, pegs or glue; you can use lamination or inlay or marquetry; and then you can beautify it with French polish or plain linseed oil or subtle stains. And when you go to dinner at a friend's house, the candlelight will pick out the contours of grain and line, and when you take your seat you will be reminded that what you are sitting on grew from the dirt, stretched towards the sun, weathered rain and wind, and sheltered animals; it was not extruded by faceless machines lined on a cold cement floor and fed from metal vats. Wood reminds us where we come from. — Nicola Griffith

Islam is in a formative period struggling to consolidate the vast reach won by both inspiration and force at its founding. Two centuries along, the faith of Muhammad hangs like an intricate veil: a religion still searching for institutional wholeness, a set of lessons to live by. — Ron Suskind

Lincoln gives a lesson in adaptive leadership even to those of us who will never advocate for compensated emancipation. Facing an uproar over the cost of the government paying slaveholders for their slaves, Lincoln showed the COST OF THE STATUS QUO, which is generally overlooked by those who oppose change. — Harold Holzer

That's the paradox: the only time most people feel alive is when they're suffering, when something overwhelms their ordinary, careful armour, and the naked child is flung out onto the world. That's why the things that are worst to undergo are best to remember. But when that child gets buried away under their adaptive and protective shells - he becomes one of the walking dead, a monster. — Ted Hughes

If you have wanted to lose ten pounds for ten years and a diet finally helps you do it, you might well assume you have accomplished your goal. But your goal actually isn't to lose ten pounds. Many people (even you?) have lost ten pounds many times! The goal is to lose ten pounds and keep the weight off. Dieting doesn't lead to weight loss that endures. For this we must join a change in behavior with a change in the way we think and feel - and in order to change the way we think and feel, we need to change our mindsets. When we are working on truly adaptive goals - ones that require us to develop our mindsets - we must continually convert what we learn from behavioral changes into changes in our mindsets. — Robert Kegan

A terrific, stimulating book ... Ramalingam clearly and engagingly shows how the use of complex adaptive systems thinking can significantly strengthen and enhance the impacts and effectiveness of global foreign aid. — Jerry Sabloff

Novelty is adaptive when things are changing and you need to adapt yourself. Tradition is essential to lay down the stability to raise families and form cohesive social groups. — Tim Jackson

At Adaptive Path, we've been doing our own work with Ajax over the last several months, and we're realizing we've only scratched the surface of the rich interaction and responsiveness that Ajax applications can provide. — Jesse James Garrett

If there is any form of contagion that is adaptive, it is the immediate response to the fear of others. If others are fearful, there may be good reason for you to be fearful too. — Frans De Waal

Water is patient; it can stagnate and let itself be coated with scum if need be. It is as gentle as the morning's dew. It is non-confrontational, even respectful, in circumventing the rocks in a stream. It makes room for everything that enters its pools. It accommodates by assuming the shape of any vessel it is poured into. And it is humble, seeking always the lowest level. Yet along with - or rather because of these adaptive, yielding properties, it is ultimately irresistible; it carves canyons out of stone. — Huston Smith

Exercising adaptive leadership is about giving meaning to your life beyond your own ambition. — Ronald A. Heifetz

'The Daily Beast' competes in the highly Darwinian media world filled with hyper-smart, highly adaptive, tool-using people with opposable thumbs. — Tina Brown

I am suggesting here that organisms have a built-I capability of adapting to their environment. I am suggesting that to the extent that evolution occurs, it occurs at the level of the organism. This suggestion differs sharply from the thesis of the NDT, which holds that evolution occurs only at the level of the population. Organisms contain within themselves the information that enables them to develop a phenotype adaptive to a variety of environments. The adaptation can occur by a change in the genome through a genetic change triggered by the environment, or it can occur without any genetic change. — Lee Spetner

Theatre people, who are an adaptive species, know that to remain sane in the process of production where everyone and his uncle has an opinion about how to fix a show, you must pick the people whose knowledge and taste you trust and stick only to these few. The Tweetocracy is no place to look. — John Lahr

The Darwinian adaptive trait of our time is the ability to figure out when we are being lied to on television. — Dick Morris

The Sun Tzu School Ping-fa Directive.
Be strong and continually aware. Manage your strength and that of others. When essential, engage on your terms. Be observant, adaptive, and subtle. Do not lose control. Act decisively. Conclude quickly. Don't Fight! — David G. Jones

The ruling quality of leaders adaptive capacity, is what allows true leaders to make the nimble decisions that bring success. Adaptive capacity is also what allows some people to transcend the setbacks and losses that come with age and to reinvent themselves again and again. — Warren G

A ... difference between most system-building in the social sciences and systems of thought and classification of the natural sciences is to be seen in their evolution. In the natural sciences both theories and descriptive systems grow by adaptation to the increasing knowledge and experience of the scientists. In the social sciences, systems often issue fully formed from the mind of one man. Then they may be much discussed if they attract attention, but progressive adaptive modification as a result of the concerted efforts of great numbers of men is rare. — Lawrence Joseph Henderson

Existing businesses aspiring to become adaptive corporations need to commit to understanding what exactly an adaptive innovator is and how that differs from both systemic designers and knowledge workers. In the end, they will actually need conscious planning to move them from a decades-imbedded orientation of knowledge work, to a new mindset of continuous adaptive innovation centered on the customer. — John Sculley

You have to be fast on your feet and adaptive or else a strategy is useless. — Charles De Gaulle

Awful momentum makes carrying through easier than calling off folly. — Barbara W. Tuchman

The human brain is still undergoing rapid adaptive evolution,. — Howard Hughes

I believe the single most important management concept that has emerged in the past fifteen years is this distinction between technical and adaptive challenges. — Graham Winter

On the one hand, I was utterly convinced that the continuation of any success I had achieved was contingent upon persistent hypervigilance. I figured this kind of behavior must be adaptive from an evolutionary standpoint - cavemen who worried about possible threats, real or imagined, probably survived longer. On the other hand, I was keenly aware that while this kind of insecurity might prolong life, it also made it less enjoyable. — Dan Harris

The shift from the perception of the child as innocent to the perception of the child as competent has greatly increased the demands on contemporary children for maturity, for participating in competitive sports, for early academic achievement, and for protecting themselves against adults who might do them harm. While children might be able to cope with any one of those demands taken singly, taken together they often exceed children's adaptive capacity. — David Elkind

Was Superstorm Sandy caused by greenhouse warming of the planet? In a word, no. Individual storms arise from specific conditions in the atmosphere. Since records have been kept, hurricanes have varied in number and intensity each season with cycles going up and coming down. The temptation to attribute any specific weather event to global warming distracts us from considering and adopting adaptive strategies, such as improving and expanding irrigation for agriculture and the water supply for cities, that will serve us well when climate changes inevitably arrives on our doorstep. — E. Kirsten Peters

In the modern world, the anxious temperament does offer certain benefits: caution, introspection, the capacity to work alone. These can be adaptive qualities. — Robin Marantz Henig

He cursed himself for having assumed the weather would be sunny. Perhaps it was the result of evolution, he thought
some adaptive gene that allowed the English to go on making blithe outdoor plans in the face of almost certain rain. — Helen Simonson

This use of building blocks to generate internal models is a pervasive feature of complex adaptive systems. — John Henry Holland

The Awa are a distinctive-looking, diminutive forest people, smaller than any of the dozen other Amazon tribespeople I have met. Reduced size is adaptive in a rain forest. You can move around more easily and unobtrusively. Not only humans but other species are smaller in rain forests. — Alex Shoumatoff

The government of the world's most powerful nation is running furiously in place. — Ron Suskind

Living in an entirely different physical as well as biotic environment, such a population would have unique opportunities to enter new niches and to select novel adaptive pathways. — Ernst Mayr

As Lynn Margulis writes: All the world's bacteria essentially have access to a single gene pool and hence to the adaptive mechanisms of the entire bacterial kingdom. The speed of recombination over that of mutation is superior: it could take eukaryotic organisms a million years to adjust to a change on a worldwide scale that bacteria can accommodate in a few years. — Steven Johnson

By 2025, we can expect the world to be completely digital. Paper books will be a thing of the past. Education will be delivered through analytics-based assessment tools and adaptive learning platforms. — Osman Rashid

It certainly would have been adaptive for ancestral man to have a chubby wife during stressful times of famine. Not only would she have had more calories to burn, and thus more energy and endurance, but since fat stores estrogen, she would have remained fertile for longer. — Helen Fisher

Often,our immediate reaction to a sudden crisis help us save ourselves. Our response to gradual crises that creep up upon us, on the other hand,may be so adaptive as to ultimately lead to self-destruction. — Amish Tripathi

What we call knowledge does not and cannot have the purpose of producing representations of an independent reality, but instead has an adaptive function. — Ernst Von Glasersfeld

Childhood is a complex dialectical process characterized by periodicity, unevenness in the development of different functions, metamorphosis or qualitative transformation of one form into another, intertwining of external and internal factors, and adaptive processes which overcome impediments that the child encounters. — Lev S. Vygotsky

Until we become the architects of a society that is truly free and ecological, it will always seem that when the human brain is not adaptive, it is more often destructive than creative. — Murray Bookchin

Unintended consequences get to the heart of why you never really understand an adaptive problem until you have solved it. Problems morph and "solutions" often point to deeper problems. In social life, as in nature, we are walking on a trampoline. Every inroad reconfigures the environment we tread on. — Richard Pascale

What I try to do in the book is to trace the chain of relationships running from elementary particles, fundamental building blocks of matter everywhere in the universe, such as quarks, all the way to complex entities, and in particular complex adaptive system like jaguars. — Murray Gell-Mann

Too many of our preferences reflect nasty behaviours and states of mind that were genetically adaptive in the ancestral environment. Instead, wouldn't it be better if we rewrote our own corrupt code? — David Pearce

Leaders who want to create adaptive, self-organizing teams steer rather than control - they influence, nudge, facilitate, teach, recommend, assist, urge, counsel, and, yes, direct in some instances. — Jim Highsmith

In adaptive terms, belief has been extraordinarily useful. It is, after all, by believing various propositions about the world that we predict events and consider the likely consequences of our actions. Beliefs are principles of action: whatever they may be at the level of the brain, they are processes by which our understanding (and misunderstanding) of the world is represented and made available to guide our behavior. — Sam Harris

Authenticity is our natural state of being. The authentic self is a state of being where we are centered, creative, adaptive, and inspired. — Henna Inam

No matter how fast weapons and technology evolve in the 21st century, one thing remains constant is that war is a human endeavor, a grueling contest between two learning and adaptive forces. Victory, therefore rests on how smart, how tough, and how dedicated our boots on the ground. — Agus Harimurti Yudhoyono

Functional, moderate guilt," writes Kochanska, "may promote future altruism, personal responsibility, adaptive behavior in school, and harmonious, competent, and prosocial relationships with parents, teachers, and friends." This is an especially important set of attributes at a time when a 2010 University of Michigan study shows that college students today are 40 percent less empathetic than they were thirty years ago, with much of the drop having occurred since 2000. (The study's authors speculate that the decline in empathy is related to the prevalence of social media, reality TV, and "hyper-competitiveness.") Of — Susan Cain

In short, we much struggle with the meaning of learning within our discipline and how best to cultivate and recognize it. For that task, we don't need routine experts who know all the right procedures but adaptive ones who can apply fundamental principles to all the situations and students they are likely to encounter, recognizing when invention is both possible and necessary and that there is no single 'best way' to teach. — Ken Bain

Harris: Yes. In fact, self-deception might have paid evolutionary dividends in other ways. Robert Trivers argues, for instance, that people who can believe their own lies turn out to be the best liars of all - and an ability to deceive rivals has obvious advantages in the state of nature. Now, clearly many things may have been adaptive for our ancestors - such as tribal warfare, rape, xenophobia - that we now deem unethical and would never want to defend. But I'm wondering if you see any possibility that a social system that maximizes truth-telling could be one that fails to maximize the well-being of all participants. Is it possible that some measure of deception is good for us? — Sam Harris

Everybody remembers numbers and computers remember numbers. People remember procedures and computers certainly remember procedures. But the other thing that's still important is that your perception as a human is affected subtly by all this stuff that you can't quite articulate. You run your life according to all this stuff that's happened to you. All of your memories affect everything you do whereas with a computer, there's adaptive software and things, but it's more literal. — Bill Nye

Of the contributions made during the essayist period three call for notice: Weismann deserves mention for his useful work in asking for the proof that "acquired characters" or, to speak more precisely, parental experience can really be transmitted to the offspring. The ocurrence of progressive adaptation by transmission of effects of use had seemed so natural to Darwin and his contemporaries that no proof of the physiological reality of the henomenon was thought necessary. Weismann's challenge revealed the utter inadequacy of the evidence on which the beliefs were based. They are doubtless isolated observations which may be interpreted as favouring the belief in these transmissions, but such meagre indications as exist are by general consent admitted to be too slight to be of much assistance in the attempt to understand how the more complex adaptive mechanisms arose. — William Bateson