Organisms Quotes - Page 14

• Natural selection is not the only process that changes organisms over time. But is the only process that seemingly designs organisms over time.

  Steven Pinker

  Design, Evolution, Natural

  Steven Pinker (2009). “How the Mind Works”, p.158, W. W. Norton & Company

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• The partition separating life from death is so tenuous. The unbelievable fragility of our organism suggests a vision on a screen: a kind of mist condenses itself into a human shape, lasts a moment and scatters.

  Czeslaw Milosz

  Philosophical, Vision, Lasts

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• When the physical organism breaks up, the soul survives. It then takes on another body.

  Paul Gauguin

  Soul, Body, Reincarnation

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• He had made a passionate study of education, only to come, gradually, to the knowledge that education is nothing but the process of building up, gradually, a complete unit of consciousness. And each unit of consciousness is the living unit of that great social, religious, philosophic idea towards which humankind, like an organism seeking its final form, is laboriously growing.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Education, Religious, Building Up

  D. H. Lawrence, David Farmer, David R. Farmer, Lindeth Vasey, John Worthen (1987). “Women in Love”, p.495, Cambridge University Press

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• The more I study nature, the more I become impressed with ever-increasing force with the conclusion, that the contrivances and beautiful adaptations slowly acquired through each part occasionally varying in a slight degree but in many ways, with the preservation or natural selection of those variations which are beneficial to the organism under the complex and ever-varying conditions of life, transcend in an incomparable degree the contrivances and adaptations which the most fertile imagination of man could suggest with unlimited time at his disposal.

  Charles Darwin

  Beautiful, Nature, Men

  "On the Various Contrivances by which British and Foreign Orchids are Fertilised by Insects: And on the Good Effects of Intercrossing".

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• Although life is a continuous process, fertilization is a critical landmark because, under ordinary circumstances, a new, genetically distinct human organism is thereby formed.... The combination of 23 chromosomes present in each pronucleus results in 46 chromosomes in the zygote. Thus the diploid number is restored and the embryonic genome is formed. The embryo now exists as a genetic unity.

  Ronan O'Rahilly

  Numbers, Unity, Ordinary

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• We conclude that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive redistribution.

  Will Durant

  Views, Concentration Of Wealth, Economic History

  Will Durant, Ariel Durant (2012). “The Lessons of History”, p.44, Simon and Schuster

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• The Harvard Law of Animal Behavior holds that under controlled experimental conditions of temperature, time, lighting, feeding, and training, the organism will behave as it damn well pleases.

  Joel Garreau

  Animal, Law, Training

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• The mainspring of creativity appears to be the same tendency which we discover so deeply as the curative force in psychotherapy, man's tendency to actualize himself, to become his potentialities. By this I mean the organic and human life, the urge to expand, extend, develop, mature - the tendency to express and activate all the capacities of the organism, or the self.

  Carl Rogers

  Creativity, Mean, Men

  Carl Rogers (2012). “On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy”, p.337, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to unbuild walls.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Wall, Social, Function

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• For once, I believe that PETA, at least on the level of logic, is correct. If the NCAA has to protect offended Native Americans ... by God, PETA ought to advocate for the protection of every organism in the animal kingdom.

  Tom Feeney

  God, Believe, Native American

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• Our primeval Mother Earth is an organism that no science in the world can rationalize. Everything on her that crawls and flies is dependent upon Her and all must hopelessly perish if that Earth dies that feeds us.

  Viktor Schauberger

  Mother, Earth Day, World

  "Our Senseless Toil". Book by Viktor Schauberger, 1934.

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• If our society continues to support basic research on how living organisms function, it is likely that my great grandchildren will be spared the agony of losing family members to most types of cancer.

  Paul D. Boyer

  Cancer, Grandchildren, Agony

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• It was the kind of blind, gulping, insensate greed that you associate with some milk-eyed creature in a volcanic fissure at the bottom of the Marianas Trench-an organism with no understanding of the existence, let alone the feelings, of other members of the ecosystem.

  Boris Johnson

  Ecosystems, Greed, Understanding

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• Society is not merely a select body of spiritual or intellectual persons, but a great organism composed of all kinds of members, a net containing bad and good.

  Robert Hugh Benson

  Spiritual, Intellectual, Society

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• The organism has one basic tendency and striving - to actualize, maintain, and enhance the experiencing organism

  Carl Rogers

  Strive, Tendencies

  Carl Rogers (2012). “Client Centred Therapy (New Ed)”, p.353, Hachette UK

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• If diphtheria is a disease caused by a microorganism, it is essential that three postulates be fulfilled. The fulfilment of these postulates is necessary in order to demonstrate strictly the parasitic nature of a disease:
  1) The organism must be shown to be constantly present in characteristic form and arrangement in the diseased tissue.
  2) The organism which, from its behaviour appears to be responsible for the disease, must be isolated and grown in pure culture.
  3) The pure culture must be shown to induce the disease experimentally.
  An early statement of Koch's postulates.

  Friedrich Loeffler

  Science, Order, Behaviour

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• Democracy is not an easy form of government, because it is never final; it is a living, changing organism, with a continuous shifting and adjusting of balance between individual freedom and general order.

  Ilka Chase

  Government, Order, Democracy

  Ilka Chase (1945). “Past Imperfect”, Pocket Books of Canada

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• The man who is extremely and dangerously hungry has no other interest but food. Capacities not useful for the satisfying of hunger are pushed into the background. 'But what happens to man's desires when there is plenty of food and his belly in chronically filled? At once, other (and higher) needs emerge and these, rather than the psychological hungers, dominate the organism.

  Betty Friedan

  Men, Desire, Needs

  BETTY FRIEDAN (1963). “The Feminine Mystique”

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• Animals are not property or "things" but rather living organisms, subjects of a life, who are worthy of our compassion, respect, friendship, and support.

  Marc Bekoff

  Animal, Compassion, Support

  Marc Bekoff (2007). “Animals Matter: A Biologist Explains Why We Should Treat Animals with Compassion and Respect”, p.72, Shambhala Publications

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• Strolling on, it seems to me that the strangeness and wonder of existence are emphasized here, in the desert, by the comparative sparsity of the flora and fauna: life not crowded upon life as in other places but scattered abroad in spareness and simplicity, with a generous gift of space for each herb and bush and tree, each stem of grass, so that the living organism stands out bold and brave and vivid against the lifeless sand and barren rock. The extreme clarity of the desert light is equaled by the extreme individuation of desert life-forms. Love flowers best in openness and freedom.

  Edward Abbey

  Flower, Space, Light

  Edward Abbey (1988). “Desert Solitaire”, p.26, University of Arizona Press

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• The world is too complicated in all parts and interconnections to be due to chance alone. I am convinced that the existence of life with all its order in each of its organisms is simply too well put together. Each part of a living thing depends on all its other parts to function. How does each part know? How is each part specified at conception? The more one learns of biochemistry the more unbelievable it becomes unless there is some type of organizing principle-an architect.

  Allan Sandage

  Order, Together, World

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• The modern research laboratory can be a large and complicated social organism.

  J. Michael Bishop

  Science, Research, Complicated

  J. Michael BISHOP (2004). “How to Win the Nobel Prize”, p.12, Harvard University Press

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• The field is a halfway house, halfway between the detail of those intimately known places and the ignorance of a landscape view ... The essence of a field is that the cultural accommodates the natural there. The human being makes room for and makes use of those organisms that are not him. In that way the field is a poem to symbiosis, and a human contract with the natural.

  Adam Nicolson

  Ignorance, Views, Essence

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• Most animals are like the unfortunate Gregor Samsa after metamorphosis. They are Kafka-creatures, organisms with rich thoughts and emotions but no system for translating what they think into something that they can express to others.

  Marc Hauser

  Animal, Thinking, Emotion

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