Organisms Quotes - Page 25

• Organisms dont think of CO2 as a poison. Plants and organisms that make shells, coral, think of it as a building block.

  Janine Benyus

  Block, Thinking, Poison

  7 Copy quote

• The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not television, or radio, but rather the complexity of the land organism.

  Aldo Leopold

  Discovery, Land, Radio

  Aldo Leopold (1972). “Round River”, p.108, Oxford University Press

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• The huge arrogance of the companies developing GMO crops and their determination to destroy the line of accountability which links the developer to the product is breath-taking. When something goes wrong, as it inevitably will, there will be a great benefit to those who have taken a stance against genetically modified organisms.

  Jonathon Porritt

  Determination, Taken, Gmos

  20 Copy quote

• Suppose that the organism is given the problem of determining the analysis of a stimulus at a certain level of representation - e.g., the problem of determining which sequence of words a given utterance encodes. Since, in the general case, transducer outputs underdetermine perceptual analyses, we can think of the solution of such problems as involving processes of nondemonstrative inference. In particular, we can think of each input system as a computational mechanism which projects and confirms a certain class of hyputheses on the basis of a certain body of data.

  Jerry Fodor

  Thinking, Data, Class

  "Wittgenstein, Mind, and Meaning". Book by Meredith Williams, 2002 edition.

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• Anxiety prepares the organism badly for an ordeal which even under more favorable circumstances would not be an easy thing to bear.

  Henryk Sienkiewicz

  Anxiety, Bears, Easy

  Henryk Sienkiewicz (1897). “Without Dogma: A Novel of Modern Poland”

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• The biochemistry and biophysics are the notes required for life; they conspire, collectively, to generate the real unit of life, the organism. The intermediate level, the chords and tempos, has to do with how the biochemistry and biophysics are organized, arranged, played out in space and time to produce a creature who grows and divides and is.

  Ursula Goodenough

  Real, Space, Levels

  Ursula Goodenough (2000). “The Sacred Depths of Nature”, p.49, Oxford University Press, USA

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• I see cities as organisms, as living creatures. To me Madrid is a man and Barcelona is a woman. And it's a woman who's extremely vain. One of the great Catalan poets, Joan Maragall, wrote this famous poem in which he called Barcelona the great enchantress, or some kind of sorceress, and in which the city has this dark enticing presence that seduces and lures people. I think Barcelona has a lot of that.

  Carlos Ruiz Zafon

  Dark, Men, Thinking

  24 Copy quote

• Painting someone's portrait is, of course, an impossible task. What an absurd idea to try and distil a human being, the most complex organism on the planet, into flicks, washes, and blobs of paint on a two-dimensional surface.

  David Cobley

  Ideas, Two, Trying

  7 Copy quote

• I am convinced that there is no sort of boundary between the living and the mental or between the biological and the psychological. From the moment an organism takes account of a previous experience and adapts to a new situation, that very much resembles psychology.

  Jean Piaget

  Psychology, Moments, Boundaries

  Jean-Claude Bringuier, Jean Piaget (1989). “Conversations with Jean Piaget”, p.3, University of Chicago Press

  62 Copy quote

  Show source

• Ants offer special advantages for some important kinds of basic biological research. The colony is a superorganism. It can be analyzed as a coherent unit and compared with the organism in the design of experiments, with the individuals treated as the rough analogues of cells.

  Bert Holldobler

  Cells, Design, Special

  6 Copy quote

• In the beginning, there were bacteria.... [A] nearly universal assumption is that all subsequent life descended from the original life form through a continuous chain of ancestor-descendant pairs. This assumption looks good because all living organisms share biochemical traits. It is conceivable, of course, that life originated more than once on the early earth but that all except one life form died out early, leaving a single lineage as the ancestor of life as we know it. If this did happen, it was the first important species extinction.

  David M. Raup

  Leaving, Important, Earth

  4 Copy quote

• We are sliding back into a dark era, and there seems little we can do about it. I am profoundly depressed at just how difficult it has become merely to get a realistic conversation started on issues such as climate change or genetically modified organisms.

  Nina Fedoroff

  Dark, Issues, Climate

  "Attacks paid for by big business are 'driving science into a dark era" by Robin McKie, www.theguardian.com. February 18, 2012.

  45 Copy quote

  Show source

• The fossil record contains no trace of these preliminary stages in the development of many-celled organisms.

  Robert Jastrow

  Fossils, Records, Development

  Robert Jastrow (1967). “Red Giants and White Dwarfs: The Evolution of Stars, Planets, and Life”

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• In man, social intercourse has centred mainly on the process of absorbing fluid into the organism, but in the domestic dog and to a lesser extent among all wild canine species, the act charged with most social significance is the excretion of fluid.

  Olaf Stapledon

  Dog, Men, Social

  Olaf Stapledon, Robert Crossley (1997). “An Olaf Stapledon Reader”, p.64, Syracuse University Press

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Only yesterday mankind lived in fear of the scourges of smallpox, cholera and plague that once swept nations before them. Now our major concern is no longer with the disease organisms that once were omnipresent; sanitation, better living conditions, and new drugs have given us a high degree of control over infectious disease. Today we are concerned with a different kind of hazard that lurks in our environment-a hazard we ourselves have introduced into our world as our modern way of life has evolved.

  Rachel Carson

  Our World, Yesterday, Drug

  Rachel Carson (2002). “Silent Spring”, p.207, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• English stupidity is an organism so primitive that it is apparently impossible to kill off. It reminds me of Physarum Polycephalum, the gigantic slime mould recently bred by scientists at Bonn. Bright yellow and about two millimetres thick, this monocellular creature--neither plant nor animal--grew to a size of 10 square yards before the scientists took fright and froze it. It can smell its favourite food, and move towards it at a speed of up to two centimetres an hour. This favourite food is porridge.

  Neal Ascherson

  Moving, Animal, Two

  10 Copy quote

• Chiropractic embraces the science of life, the knowledge of how organisms act in health and disease, and also the art of adjusting the neuroskeleton.

  Daniel D. Palmer

  Art, Disease, Adjusting

  17 Copy quote

• Single cells analyze thousands of stimuli from the microenvironment they inhabit. The more awareness an organism has of its environment, the better its chances for survival. When cells band together they increase their awareness exponentially. Division of labor among the cells in the community offers an additional survival advantage. The efficiency it enables more cells to live on less. Evolution is based on an instructive, cooperative interaction among organisms and their environment enables life forms to survive and evolve in a dynamic world.

  Bruce H. Lipton

  Teamwork, Cells, Division Of Labor

  10 Copy quote

• My one and only piece of relevant evidence [for an Aristotelian God] is the apparent impossibility of providing a naturalistic theory of the origin from DNA of the first reproducing species ... [In fact] the only reason which I have for beginning to think of believing in a First Cause god is the impossibility of providing a naturalistic account of the origin of the first reproducing organisms.

  Antony Flew

  Believe, Thinking, Dna

  29 Copy quote

• It has become inordinately difficult even to begin to think about constructing a naturalistic theory of the evolution of that first reproducing organism.

  Antony Flew

  Thinking, Firsts, Evolution

  "Atheist finds 'God' after 50 years" by Laura Smith, www.theguardian.com. December 10, 2004.

  16 Copy quote

  Show source

• We're at a point in time which is analogous to when single-celled organisms were turning into multi-celled organisms. So we're the amoebas.

  Danny Hillis

  Motivation, Inspiration

  5 Copy quote

• When in organism there are cancer cells, they have to be removed, not helped because they're "so young" and "so creative".

  Janusz Korwin-Mikke

  Cancer, Cells, Creative

  Blog post, August 29, 2007.

  19 Copy quote

  Show source

• The physical life of an individual person is limited, but the life of the masses united as an independent social-political organism is immortal. Only when an individual becomes a member of this community can he acquire the immortal social-political life.

  Kim Jong Il

  Independent, Community, Political

  "Theory of the Immortal Social-Political Body". 1986.

  18 Copy quote

  Show source

• If the aging process is controlled in a similar way in worms and humans, then we can use what we learn about worms to speed our study of higher organisms.

  Cynthia Kenyon

  Use, Way, Aging

  4 Copy quote

• In a sense, evolution adheres to the classic twelve-step program: it takes things one day at a time. It does not strive for perfection; it does not strive at all. There is no progress, no plans, no scala natura, or scale of nature, that ranks organisms from lowly to superior, primitive to advanced.

  Natalie

  Perfection, One Day At A Time, Progress

  4 Copy quote