Biology Quotes - Page 7

• The typical imperative from biology is not "Thou shalt... ," but "If ... then ... else.

  Steven Pinker

  Typical, If Then, Imperatives

  Steven Pinker (2009). “How the Mind Works”, p.27, W. W. Norton & Company

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• DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created.

  Bill Gates

  Dna, Computer, Program

  Bill Gates, Nathan Myhrvold, Peter Rinearson (1996). “The road ahead”

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• These days vampires gravitated toward particle accelerators, projects to decode the genome, and molecular biology. Once they had flocked to alchemy, anatomy, and electricity. If it went bang, involved blood, or promised to unlock the secrets of the universe, there was sure to be a vampire around.

  Deborah Harkness

  Blood, Secret, Vampire

  Deborah Harkness (2014). “All Souls Trilogy”, p.26, Penguin

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• Biology designed the dance. Terror timed it. Dictated the rhythm with which their bodies answered each other. As though they already knew that for each tremor of pleasure they would pay with an equal measure of pain. As though they knew that how far they went would be measured against how far they would be taken.

  Arundhati Roy

  Pain, Taken, Body

  FaceBook post by Arundhati Roy from Feb 25, 2017

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• How do people stay in love, anyway? Is it a choice? Or is it like those plants we studied in biology that mutate into something new and totally different but are still part of the same plant family?

  Libba Bray

  People, Choices, Different

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• When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off by drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles. The other students in the class interrupt me: "We *know* all that!" "Oh," I say, "you *do*? Then no *wonder* I can catch up with you so fast after you've had four years of biology." They had wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Cat, Years, Class

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• Men's ideas about what women are have been formed from their ruling caste position, and have assigned women characteristics that would most advantage their masters, as well as justify men's rule over them. They do not represent 'truth' but have been promoted as if they were, with the backing of science and patriarchal views of biology.

  Sheila Jeffreys

  Men, Views, Ideas

  Sheila Jeffreys (2014). “Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism”, p.7, Routledge

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• A new vision and understanding of something demands a new way of talking about it, for the old terminology gets in the way of this effort. Stubbornly entrenched behind the words coined by a particular conceptual orientation are its secrete prejudices. Any attempt to open out an adequately human vista onto the phenomena of undisturbed existence must include a critique of the most important idea of traditional biology, physiology, and psychology.

  Medard Boss

  Talking, Ideas, Effort

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• For me, it's really easy to be kind to others when I remember that none of us came into this world with a manual about how to get it all right. We are ultimately a product of our biology and environment. Consequently, I choose to be compassionate with others when I consider how much painful emotional baggage we are biologically programmed to carry around. I recognize that mistakes will be made, but this does not mean that I need to either victimize myself or take your actions and mistakes personally. Your stuff is your stuff, and my stuff is my stuff.

  Jill Bolte Taylor

  Mistake, Mean, Emotional

  Jill Bolte Taylor (2008). “My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey”, p.156, Penguin

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• The existing and long-standing use of the word 'evolution' in our state's textbooks has not adversely affected Georgians' belief in the omnipotence of God as creator of the universe, There can be no incompatibility between Christian faith and proven facts concerning geology, biology, and astronomy. There is no need to teach that stars can fall out of the sky and land on a flat Earth in order to defend our religious faith.

  Jimmy Carter

  Christian, Religious, Stars

  "Carter slams Georgia's 'evolution' proposal". The CNN Interview, edition.cnn.com. January 30, 2004.

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• But biology and computer science - life and computation - are related. I am confident that at their interface great discoveries await those who seek them.

  Leonard Adleman

  Discovery, Computer, Science Life

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• It's funny but when young people say to me "what can I study to be a force for change, should I study law or biology or business?" My answer is music, drama, journalism, communications.

  Paul Watson

  Drama, Communication, Law

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• This is not to deny that there are versions of theism that do conflict with evolutionary biology. Young Earth Creationism is an example; it claims that God created life on earth within the past 10,000 to 50,000 years. But other types of theism are different.

  Elliott Sober

  Past, Years, Example

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I don't endorse deism or interventionist theism. My point is just that evolutionary biology is logically compatible with the former and with some versions of the latter.

  Elliott Sober

  Latter, Theism, Deism

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Seen in the light of evolution, biology is, perhaps, intellectually the most satisfying and inspiring science. Without that light it becomes a pile of sundry facts -- some of them interesting or curious but making no meaningful picture as a whole.

  Theodosius Dobzhansky

  Meaningful, Light, Interesting

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• The more evolutionary theory gets called an atheistic theory, the greater the risk that it will lose its place in public school biology courses in the United States. If the theory is thought of in this way, one should not be surprised if a judge at some point decides that teaching evolutionary theory violates the Constitutional principle of neutrality with respect to religion.

  Elliott Sober

  Teaching, School, Judging

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Paleontologist Niles Eldredge, a prominent evolutionist, said: 'The doubt that has infiltrated the previous, smugly confident certitude of evolutionary biology’s last twenty years has inflamed passions.' He spoke of the 'lack of total agreement even within the warring camps,' and added, 'things really are in an uproar these days . . . Sometimes it seems as though there are as many variations on each [evolutionary] theme as there are individual biologists.'

  Niles Eldredge

  Passion, Years, Agreement

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• The big picture, I think, is that common ancestry is evidentially prior to natural selection in Darwin's theory and in contemporary evolutionary biology as well.

  Elliott Sober

  Thinking, Ancestry, Common

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• National Socialism is applied biology.

  Hans Schemm

  Socialism

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• Human paleontology shares a peculiar trait with such disparate subjects as theology and extraterrestrial biology: it contains more practitioners than objects for study.

  David Pilbeam

  Peculiar, Paleontology, Study

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• Philosophers of biology generally recognize that evolutionary fitness (roughly, an organism's ability to survive and reproduce in its environment) is multiply realizable.

  Elliott Sober

  Philosopher, Environment, Ability

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• A large number of well-trained scientists outside of evolutionary biology and paleontology have unfortunately gotten the idea that the fossil record is far more Darwinian than it is. This probably comes from the oversimplification inevitable in secondary sources: low-level textbooks semipopular articles, and so on. Also, there is probably some wishful thinking involved. In the years after Darwin, his advocates hoped to find predictable progressions. In general. these have not been found-yet the optimism has died hard and some pure fantasy has crept into textbooks.

  David M. Raup

  Thinking, Years, Ideas

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• Through the discovery of Buchner, Biology was relieved of another fragment of mysticism. The splitting up of sugar into CO2 and alcohol is no more the effect of a 'vital principle' than the splitting up of cane sugar by invertase. The history of this problem is instructive, as it warns us against considering problems as beyond our reach because they have not yet found their solution.

  Jacques Loeb

  Science, Discovery, Alcohol

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• A renaissance in cellular biology has recently revealed the molecular mechanisms by which thoughts and perceptions directly influence gene activity and cell behavior...Energy psychology, through its ability to rapidly identify and reprogram limiting misconceptions, represents the most powerful and effective process to enhance physical and emotional well being.

  Bruce H. Lipton

  Powerful, Emotional, Cells

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• Computer science is to biology what calculus is to physics. It's the natural mathematical technique that best maps the character of the subject.

  Harold Morowitz

  Learning, Character, Technique

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