Biologist Quotes - Page 3

• No practical biologist interested in sexual reproduction would be led to work out the detailed consequences experienced by organisms having three or more sexes; yet what else should he do if he wishes to understand why the sexes are, in fact, always two?

  Ronald Fisher

  Sex, Two, Work Out

  "The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection". Book by Ronald Fisher, 1930.

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• [E]volutionists sometimes take as haughty an attitude toward the next level up the conventional ladder of disciplines: the human sciences. They decry the supposed atheoretical particularism of their anthropological colleagues and argue that all would be well if only the students of humanity regarded their subject as yet another animal and therefore yielded explanatory control to evolutionary biologists.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Attitude, Animal, Discipline

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “An Urchin in the Storm: Essays about Books and Ideas”, p.64, W. W. Norton & Company

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• I didn't have toys and bikes; I'd go out and pick up rocks. I was into science and nature. It was my first love. I was going to be a vet and a marine biologist. I went to university and studied biology for two weeks and I just thought: "I've been conned!"

  Ricky Gervais

  Marine, First Love, Two

  "Ghost Town - Ricky Gervais interview". Interview with Rob Carnevale, www.indielondon.co.uk.

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• A complete theory of evolution must acknowledge a balance between "external" forces of environment imposing selection for local adaptation and "internal" forces representing constraints of inheritance and development. Vavilov placed too much emphasis on internal constraints and downgraded the power of selection. But Western Darwinians have erred equally in practically ignoring (while acknowledging in theory) the limits placed on selection by structure and development what Vavilov and the older biologists would have called "laws of form.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Law, Theory Of Evolution, Balance

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History”, p.144, W. W. Norton & Company

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• originality" is everyone's aim, and novel techniques are as much prized as new scientific discoveries. [T.S.] Eliot states it with surprising naïveté: "It is exactly as wasteful for a poet to do what has been done already as for a biologist to rediscover Mendel's discoveries.

  Randall Jarrell

  Discovery, Done, Technique

  "Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964". Book by Randall Jarrell, "The End of the Line" (pp. 79 - 80), 1980.

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• The attitude of the true scientist towards the real limits of human understanding was unforgettably impressed on me in early youth by the obviously unpremeditated words of a great biologist; Alfred Kuhn finished a lecture to the Austrian Academy of Science with Goethe 's words, "It is the greatest joy of the man of thought to have explored the explorable and then calmly to revere the inexplorable." After the last word he hesitated, raised his hand in repudiation and cried, above the applause, "No, not calmly, gentlemen; not calmly!

  Konrad Lorenz

  Attitude, Real, Men

  "On Aggression". Book by Konrad Lorenz, Ch. XII : On the Virtue of Scientific Humility, 1963.

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• Year-end financial statements express a truth about office life which is no less irrefutable yet also, in the end, no less irrelevant or irritating than an evolutionary biologist's proud reminder that the purpose of existence lies in the propagation of our genes.

  Alain de Botton

  Lying, Years, Year End

  "The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work". Book by Alain de Botton, 2009.

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• An evolutionary biologist and a fundamentalist may see the same chimpanzee sitting in a cage, but in another important way, they do not. And they may approach the details of their lives in very different ways.

  Peg O'Connor

  Important, Sitting, May

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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• More attention to the History of Science is needed, as much by scientists as by historians, and especially by biologists, and this should mean a deliberate attempt to understand the thoughts of the great masters of the past, to see in what circumstances or intellectual milieu their ideas were formed, where they took the wrong turning or stopped short on the right track.

  Ronald Fisher

  Mean, Past, Ideas

  "Natural selection from the genetical standpoint". "Australian Journal of Earth Sciences" Peer-reviewed journal, 1959.

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• Psychohistory, like psychoanalysis, is a science in which the researcher's feelings are as much or even more a part of his research equipment than his eyes or his hands. Weighing of complex motives can only be accomplished by identification with human actors, the usual suppression of all feeling preached and followed by most "science" simply cripples a psychohistorian as badly as it would cripple a biologist to be forbidden the use of a microscope. The emotional development of a psychohistorian is therefore as much a topic for discussion as his or her intellectual development.

  Lloyd deMause

  Eye, Emotional, Hands

  "Foundations of Psychohistory". Book by Lloyd deMause, 1982.

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• You may consider yourself an individual, but as a cell biologist, I can tell you that you are in truth a cooperative community of approximately fifty trillion single-celled citizens.

  Bruce H. Lipton

  Single, Cells, People

  Bruce H. Lipton (2010). “The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter and Miracles: Easyread Large Edition”, p.28, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• Like all biologists I simply acknowledge the gravity of the current situation. There are scenarios under which things work out well and to that extent I'm a cautious optimist.

  Richard Lewontin

  Work Out, Gravity, Currents

  Source: www.abc.net.au

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• Darwin seems to lose out with the public primarily when his supporters force him into a mano-a-mano Thunderdome death match against the Almighty. Most people seem willing to accept Darwinism as long as they don't have to believe in nothing but Darwinism. Thus, the strident tub-thumping for absolute atheism by evolutionary biologists like Richard Dawkins, whom the new issue of Discover Magazine rightly criticizes as "Darwin's Rottweiler," is self-defeating.

  Steve Sailer

  Believe, Self, Issues

  "The Left Doesn't Like Darwin Either". vdare.com, August 7, 2005.

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• It is so hard for an evolutionary biologist to write about extinction caused by human stupidity. Let me then float an unconventional plea, the inverse of the usual argument. The extinction of Partula is unfair to Partula. That is the conventional argument, and I do not challenge its primacy. But we need a humanistic ecology as well, both for the practical reason that people will always touch people more than snails do or can, and for the moral reason that humans are legitimately the measure of all ethical questions for these are our issues, not nature's.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Writing, Issues, Ethical Questions

  "Eight Little Piggies: Reflections in Natural History". Book by Stephen Jay Gould. "Unenchanted Evening", p. 39, 1993.

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• Like no other science, astrophysics cross-pollinate s the expertise of chemists, biologists, geologists and physicists, all to discover the past, present, and future of the cosmos-and our humble place within it.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Humble, Science, Past

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• Commerce, trade and exchange make other people more valuable alive than dead, and mean that people try to anticipate what the other guy needs and wants. It engages the mechanisms of reciprocal altruism, as the evolutionary biologists call it, as opposed to raw dominance.

  Steven Pinker

  Mean, People, Guy

  "The Importance of Being Businessworthy" by Per L. Saxegaard, www.huffingtonpost.com. May 4, 2015.

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• I don't think I would ever be a doctor, but the reason I majored in science was because you could become a civil engineer, you could become a biologist, you could become a computer scientist - that was the point of it. I had no idea what I wanted to do. In my last two years of high school here happened to be these few scripts that I really responded to. Eventually, I landed the job, and that was something that I felt transcended whatever other people would think of me.

  Bill Skarsgard

  School, Thinking, People

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• To be with another scientist and make a discovery and share that with a global audience, or working with bear biologists in Alaska, by helicopter - [it's] really what I've given my whole life to. And I get to do that just about every week.

  Jeff Corwin

  Alaska, Discovery, Bears

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• Darwin's principle of natural selection leads to the prediction that the proper way to analyze any evolutionary development is to see the new features as adaptive to environments. And that's a perfectly good principle. The problem is that there are many evolutionary biologists who view everything that happens in evolution as directly evolved for adaptive benefit. And that just doesn't work. Whenever you build a structure for adaptive reasons, the structure is going to exhibit properties that have nothing to do with adaptation. They're just side consequences.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Evolution, Problem, Environment

  Interview With Michael Krasny, www.motherjones.com. January/February 1997.

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• The relevant features of scientific practice often have mundane explanations which don't point to any deep metaphysical moral. (Thus it would simply be messy and pointless for the chemists to essay physical reductions, or for the biologists to offer number-free explanations. It's a weird kind of science-worship that views these practical considerations as clues to the nature of reality.)

  David Papineau

  Reality, Numbers, Views

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

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• I've always had a natural affiliation with nature. If I wasn't an actor, I'd be some sort of biologist working in the field in Africa or something.

  Callan McAuliffe

  Actors, Fields, Natural

  "Q&A: Callan McAuliffe On His Mission to Save Wolfdogs". Interview with Degen Pener, www.hollywoodreporter.com. November 3, 2011.

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• ... many folks take them seriously because they just 'know' that evolution can never be seen in the immediate here and now. In fact, a precisely opposite situation prevails: biologists have documented a veritable glut of cases for rapid and eminently measurable evolution on timescales of years and decades.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Years, Opposites, Facts

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• My two older brothers are both molecular biologists and neuroscientists, and I feel like representing them accurately is never done in movies, and I really wanted to at least capture the spirit of a Ph.D. student whose goal and aspiration is to increase the sum total of human knowledge. That is noble. That was really, really important, to capture the three-dimensionality of scientists. Scientists fall in love, scientists have the greatest sense of humor, scientists are passionate.

  Mike Cahill

  Falling In Love, Brother, Two

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• All qualified physicists, biologists, cosmologists and geologists agree, on the basis of massive, mutually corroborating evidence, that the earth's age is at least four billion years.

  Richard Dawkins

  Years, Age, Earth

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• Any strategy that attempts to reinforce faith by undermining science is also doomed to failure. Showing that some scientific theory is wrong will not prove that the religious alternative is correct by default. When the sun was shown not to be the center of the universe, as Copernicus had proposed, the Earth was not moved back to that singular position in the cosmos. If Darwinian evolution is proved wrong, biologists will not develop a new theory based on the hypothesis that each species was created separately by God 6,000years ago.

  Victor J. Stenger

  Religious, Religion, Cosmos

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