Biologist Quotes - Page 7

• Dawkins asserts that final causes and design don't really exist. Unguided evolution explains it all. Francis Crick thought the same thing but was afraid people would be misled by what they actually saw. So he issued this warning: "Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved." What? A warning to ignore the obvious? Absolutely. Because if we don't ignore the obvious, we might be tempted to follow common sense and attribute the "appearance" of design to actual design.

  Frank Turek

  People, Common Sense, Design

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• If I wasn't a writer, I don't know what I'd be. Probably a marine biologist or something.

  Jeff VanderMeer

  Marine, Knows, Ifs

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• Life, individual or collective, personal or historic, is the one entity in the universe whose substance is compact of danger, of adventure. It is, in the strict sense of the word, drama. The primary, radical meaning of life appears when it is employed in the sense not of biology, but of biography. For the very strong reason that the whole of biology is quite definitely only a chapter in certain biographies, it is what biologists do in the portion of their lives open to biography.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

  Strong, Drama, Adventure

  "The Revolt of the Masses". Book by José Ortega y Gasset. Chapter IX: "The Primitive and the Technical", 1929.

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• Until 1930 or thereabout biologists [using microscopes], in the situation of Astronomers and Astrophysicists, were permitted to see the objects of their interest, but not to touch them; the cell was as distant from us, as the stars and galaxies were from them.

  Albert Claude

  Stars, Science, Cells

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• There was an op-ed piece in The New York Times by an evolutionary biologist or somebody - which was a curious place for the opinion to come from - and he said that there's no such thing as a completely free, uncensored medium, that people censor themselves all the time, in deference to hurting other people's feelings, or offending other groups, or in their own, not to provoke a fight. And you do self-censor certain things, and it's not necessarily a bad thing. That's just the way human social interaction works.

  David Byrne

  Hurt, Fighting, People

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• Psychologists would say that the only two important forms of social learning are imitation and teaching, and they will spend time trying to figure out if animals imitate or teach. Sometimes they find they do; sometimes they find they don't. And so that's kind of the level of controversy there. Biologists would include imitation and teaching and a range of other kinds of social learning. So we would call that culture, whereas the psychologist wouldn't.

  Hal Whitehead

  Teaching, Animal, Trying

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• The business of proving evolution has reached a stage when it is futile for biologists to work merely to discover more and more evidence of evolution. Those who choose to believe that God created every biological species separately in the state we observe them, but made them in a way calculated to lead us to the conclusion that they are the products of an evolutionary development are obviously not open to argument. All that can be said is that their belief is an implicit blasphemy, for it imputes to God an appalling deviousness.

  Theodosius Dobzhansky

  Believe, Development, Way

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• I think people all over the institution recognize that different ways of understanding are valuable. Artists may think in a different way than biologists or chemists, but you can learn something from that. It is true that the arts at MIT don't have the same amount of funding or same status as the sciences or engineering.

  Alan Lightman

  Art, Thinking, Engineering

  Interview with Robert Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. November 16, 2000.

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• It was fascinating listening to this wonderful biologist, Sarah Allen Miller, speak of her relationship to these beings for 20 years.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Years, Listening, Speak

  Terry Tempest Williams (2006). “A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams”, Utah State Univ Pr

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• If you're a conservation biologist in many fields, you're seeing your study subject disappear. People are in the position where they're chronicling radical decline, and that is not a position that conservation biologists want to be in.

  Elizabeth Kolbert

  People, Want, Fields

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• The job of the linguist, like that of the biologist or the botanist, is not to tell us how nature should behave, or what its creations should look like, but to describe those creations in all their messy glory and try to figure out what they can teach us about life, the world, and, especially in the case of linguistics, the workings of the human mind.

  Arika Okrent

  Jobs, Mind, Trying

  Arika Okrent (2009). “In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language”, p.5, Spiegel & Grau

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• Although a biologist, I must confess I do not understand how life came about...  I consider that life only starts at the level of a functional cell. The most primitive cells may require at least several hundred different specific biological macro-molecules. How such already quite complex structures may have come together, remains a mystery to me. The possibility of the existence of a Creator, of God, represents to me a satisfactory solution to this problem.

  Werner Arber

  Cells, Together, Molecules

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• I think that we reject the evidence that our world is changing because we are still, as that wonderfully wise biologist E. O. Wilson reminded us, tribal carnivores. We are programmed by our inheritance to see other living things as mainly something to eat, and we care more about our national tribe than anything else. We will even give our lives for it and are quite ready to kill other humans in the cruellest of ways for the good of our tribe. We still find alien the concept that we and the rest of life, from bacteria to whales, are parts of the much larger and diverse entity, the living Earth.

  James Lovelock

  Wise, Thinking, Our World

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• The principle of [divine] purpose... stares the biologist in the face wherever he looks... The probability for such an event as the origin of DNA molecules to have occurred by sheer chance is just too small to be seriously considered.

  Ernst Boris Chain

  Dna, Faces, Principles

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