Biology Quotes - Page 20

• Darwin was a biological evolutionist, because he was first a uniformitarian geologist. Biology is pre-eminent to-day among the natural sciences, because its younger sister, Geology, gave it the means.

  Charles Lapworth

  Mean, Science, Firsts

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• A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.

  Fred Hoyle

  Science, If There Is A God, Numbers

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• The battle over the validity of evolution has been publicly posed as a scientific one. However, you will find little sign of it in scientific journals, where such quarrels as exist are over details, not the basic concept... Evolution has proved so useful as a paradigm for the origin and structure of life that it constitutes the foundation of the sciences of biology and medicine.

  Victor J. Stenger

  Medicine, Religion, Atheism

  Victor J. Stenger (2003). “Has Science Found God?: The Latest Results in the Search for Purpose in the Universe”, Pyr Books

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• Though we feel we can choose what we do, our understanding of the molecular basis of biology shows that biological processes are governed by the laws of physics and chemistry and therefore are as determined as the orbits of the planets.

  Stephen Hawking

  Law, Understanding, Religion

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• I took biology in high school and didn't like it at all. It was focused on memorization. ... I didn't appreciate that biology also had principles and logic ... [rather than dealing with a] messy thing called life. It just wasn't organized, and I wanted to stick with the nice pristine sciences of chemistry and physics, where everything made sense. I wish I had learned sooner that biology could be fun as well.

  Francis Collins

  Appreciation, Fun, Nice

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• If a sect does officially insist that its structure of belief demands that evolution be false, then no compromise is possible. An honest and competent biology teacher can only conclude that the sect's beliefs are wrong and that its religion is a false one.

  George Gaylord Simpson

  Teacher, Doe, Demand

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• Biological determinism is, in its essence, a theory of limits. It takes the current status of groups as a measure of where they should and must be ... We inhabit a world of human differences and predilections, but the extrapolation of these facts to theories of rigid limits is ideology.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Science, Essence, Differences

  Stephen Jay Gould (2006). “The Mismeasure of Man (Revised & Expanded)”, p.36, W. W. Norton & Company

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• We know the laws of trial and error, of large numbers and probabilities. We know that these laws are part of the mathematical and mechanical fabric of the universe, and that they are also at play in biological processes. But, in the name of the experimental method and out of our poor knowledge, are we really entitled to claim that everything happens by chance, to the exclusion of all other possibilities?

  Albert Claude

  Knowledge, Science, Errors

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• This missing science of heredity, this unworked mine of knowledge on the borderland of biology and anthropology, which for all practical purposes is as unworked now as it was in the days of Plato, is, in simple truth, ten times more important to humanity than all the chemistry and physics, all the technical and indsutrial science that ever has been or ever will be discovered.

  George Herbert

  Plato, Knowledge, Science

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• The work I have done has, already, been adequately rewarded and recognized. Imagination reaches out repeatedly trying to achieve some higher level of understanding, until suddenly I find myself momentarily alone before one new corner of nature's pattern of beauty and true majesty revealed. That was my reward.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Science, Imagination, Understanding

  Richard P. Feynman (2008). “Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track: The Letters of Richard P. Feynman”, p.32, Hachette UK

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• We must [it has been arued] go beyond reductionism to a holistic recognition that biology and culture interpenetrate in an inextricable manner.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Culture, Recognition, Reductionism

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• The time has come to link ecology to economic and human development. When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all. What is happening to the rain forests of Madagascar and Brazil will affect us all.

  E. O. Wilson

  Rain, Knowledge, Science

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• The foundations of population genetics were laid chiefly by mathematical deduction from basic premises contained in the works of Mendel and Morgan and their followers. Haldane, Wright, and Fisher are the pioneers of population genetics whose main research equipment was paper and ink rather than microscopes, experimental fields, Drosophila bottles, or mouse cages. Theirs is theoretical biology at its best, and it has provided a guiding light for rigorous quantitative experimentation and observation.

  Theodosius Dobzhansky

  Science, Light, Ink

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• Science is not a system of certain, or -established, statements; nor is it a system which steadily advances towards a state of finality... And our guesses are guided by the unscientific, the metaphysical (though biologically explicable) faith in laws, in regularities which we can uncover-discover. Like Bacon, we might describe our own contemporary science-'the method of reasoning which men now ordinarily apply to nature'-as consisting of 'anticipations, rash and premature' and as 'prejudices'.

  Karl Popper

  Nature, Science, Men

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• Metaphysical ghosts cannot be killed, because they cannot be touched; but they may be dispelled by dispelling the twilight in which shadows and solidities are easily confounded. The Vital Principle is an entity of this ghostly kind; and although the daylight has dissipated it, and positive Biology is no longer vexed with its visitations, it nevertheless reappears in another shape in the shadowy region of mystery which surrounds biological and all other questions.

  George Henry Lewes

  Twilight, Science, Shadow

  George Henry Lewes (1867). “The History of Philosophy from Thales to Comte by George Henry Lewes: Ancient philosophy”, p.84

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• The fundamental biological variant is DNA. That is why Mendel's definition of the gene as the unvarying bearer of hereditary traits, its chemical identification by Avery (confirmed by Hershey), and the elucidation by Watson and Crick of the structural basis of its replicative invariance, are without any doubt the most important discoveries ever made in biology. To this must be added the theory of natural selection, whose certainty and full significance were established only by those later theories.

  Jacques Monod

  Science, Dna, Discovery

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• It seems a miracle that young children easily learn the language of any environment into which they were born. The generative approach to grammar, pioneered by Chomsky, argues that this is only explicable if certain deep, universal features of this competence are innate characteristics of the human brain. Biologically speaking, this hypothesis of an inheritable capability to learn any language means that it must somehow be encoded in the DNA of our chromosomes. Should this hypothesis one day be verified, then lingusitics would become a branch of biology.

  Niels Kaj Jerne

  Children, Mean, Science

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• I have been a biologist for a long time, and I hope I never stop getting shivers in my spine when I think about the beauty of how we come to know things in biology. Biologists make predictions, then they go out into the field or the lab to see if their predictions hold up. When hundreds of predictions of this sort are fulfilled, a theory reaches the point where it becomes certain, at least on a broad level. And that is where we are with evolution.

  Darrel R. Falk

  Thinking, Long, Levels

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• Considering that we live in an era of evolutionary everything---evolutionary biology, evolutionary medicine, evolutionary ecology, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary economics, evolutionary computing---it was surprising how rarely people thought in evolutionary terms. It was a human blind spot. We look at the world around us as a snapshot when it was really a movie, constantly changing.

  Michael Crichton

  Blind Spots, Medicine, People

  Michael Crichton (2002). “Prey”

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• Evolution lies at the heart of biology. It is seamlessly and continuously linked to health research to better understand such conditions as AIDS or bird flu or Parkinson's or cancer or heart disease. Every biomedical experiment, every tiny advance, every major breakthrough ultimately connects to the principles first postulated by Darwin.

  Huntington Willard

  Cancer, Lying, Heart

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• The theory of natural selection is the centerpiece of The Origin of Species and of evolutionary theory. It is this theory that accounts for the adaptations of organisms, those innumerable features that so wonderfully equip them for survival and reproduction; it is this theory that accounts for the divergence of species from common ancestors and thus for the endless diversity of life. Natural selection is a simple concept, but it is perhaps the most important idea in biology.

  Douglas J. Futuyma

  Simple, Ideas, Diversity

  Douglas J. Futuyma (2009). “Evolution”, Sinauer Associates Incorporated

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• We are now witnessing, after the slow fermentation of fifty years, a concentration of technical power aimed at the essential determinants of heredity, development and disease. This concentration is made possible by the common function of nucleic acids as the molecular midwife of all reproductive particles. Indeed it is the nucleic acids which, in spite of their chemical obscurity, are giving to biology a unity which has so far been lacking, a chemical unity.

  C. D. Darlington

  Years, Giving, Unity

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• Molecular biology is essentially the practice of biochemistry without a license.

  Erwin Chargaff

  Science, Practice, Molecular Biology

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• I couldn't think. The basics of my life seemed altered and thrown into question. After all, our families--our ancestors--are our identities. Biology is destiny. I'm not who you think I am, I had said to T.J. the last time I'd seen him. Maybe I wasn't who I'd thought I was either.

  Aimee Friedman

  Destiny, Thinking, Identity

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• ...she could express her soul with that voice, whenver I listened to her I felt my life meant more than mere biology...she could really hear, she understood structure and she could analyze exactly what it was about a piece of music that had to be rendered just so...she was a very emotional person, Annette. She brought that out in other people. After she died I don't think I ever really felt anything again.

  Audrey Niffenegger

  Emotional, Thinking, Voice

  Audrey Niffenegger (2014). “The Time Traveler's Wife”, p.234, Simon and Schuster

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