Karol

“Thus he who looks away first is the more dominant. In my view, breaking eye contact can be high status so long as you don’t immediately glance back for a fraction of a second. If you ignore someone your status rises, if you feel impelled to look back then it falls. Thus dark glasses raise status because we can’t see the submission of the eyes.”
― Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre

“Back in Leiden, Tinbergen continued these explorations, now grounded in Lorenz’s theoretical concepts. He studied butterflies and found that marks on the torso of the female and its vibratory movements were the sole mating releasers—he
could construct dummy butterfly torsos with brighter stripes and more regular movements. Males would ignore a live female to mount cardboard cylinders that didn’t even need wings!”
― Deirdre Barrett, Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose

“Dorothy Norman invited me to dinner in New York.
There was a lady there from Philadelphia who was
an authority on Buddhist art. When she found out
I was interested in mushrooms, she said, “Have
you an explanation of the symbolism involved in the
death of the Buddha by his eating a mushroom?” I
explained that I’d never been interested in
symbolism; that I preferred just taking things as
themselves, not as standing for other things.
But then a few days later while rambling in the
woods I got to thinking. I recalled the Indian
concept of the relation of life and the seasons.
Spring is Creation. Summer is Preservation.
Fall is Destruction. Winter is
Quiescence. Mushrooms grow most vigorously in
the fall, the period of destruction, and the
function of many of them is to bring about the final
decay of rotting material. In fact, as I
read somewhere, the world would be an impassible
heap of old rubbish were it not for mushrooms and
their capacity to get rid of it. So I wrote to
the lady in Philadelphia. I said, “The
function of mushrooms is to rid the world of old
rubbish. The Buddha died a natural death.”
― John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings

“Evolution advances by taking available resources and cobbling them together to create new uses. The evolutionary theorist François Jacob captured this in his concept of evolution as a “tinkerer,” not an engineer;”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From