Quotes about biology

[D]umb evolutionary processes have dramatically amplified the intelligence in the human lineage even compared with our close relatives the great apes and our own humanoid ancestors and there is no reason to suppose Homo sapiens to have reached the apex of cognitive effectiveness attainable in a biological system.

With my biology degree, I got this job at an environmental lab. We tested sewage runoff, we tested chemical warfare waste runoff. It's a job I'll never do again and I would never wish upon anybody.

To the question of whether sharing 96% of our genetic make-up with chimps makes us 96 percent chimp we also share about 50% of our DNA with bananas - that does not make us half bananas!

Those who have dissected or inspected many [bodies] have at least learnt to doubt while others who are ignorant of anatomy and do not take the trouble to attend it are in no doubt at all.

A totally blind process can by definition lead to anything it can even lead to vision itself.

The secrets of evolution are death and time—the deaths of enormous numbers of lifeforms that were imperfectly adapted to the environment and time for a long succession of small mutations.

The evolution of higher and of lower forms of life is as well and as soundly established as the eternal hills. It has long since ceased to be a theory it is a law of Nature as universal in living things as is the law of gravitation in material things and in the motions of the heavenly spheres.

But I am not those people. I am just the biologist I don’t require any of this to have a deeper meaning.

As a young boy, I was obsessed with endangered species and the extinct species that men killed off. Biology was the subject in school that I was incredibly passionate about.

I think it's reasonable to suppose that one could oscillate between being biologically 20 and biologically 25 indefinitely.

I would like to start by emphasizing the importance of surfaces. It is at a surface where many of our most interesting and useful phenomena occur. We live for example on the surface of a planet. It is at a surface where the catalysis of chemical reactions occur. It is essentially at a surface of a plant that sunlight is converted to a sugar. In electronics, most if not all active circuit elements involve non-equilibrium phenomena occurring at surfaces. Much of biology is concerned with reactions

Our brains contain one hundred billion nerve cells (neurons). Each neuron makes links with ten thousand other neurons to form an incredible three dimensional grid. This grid therefore contains a thousand trillion connections - that's 1,000,000,000,000,000 (a quadrillion). It's hard to imagine this, so let's visualise each connection as a disc that's 1mm thick. Stack up the quadrillion discs on top of each other and they will reach the sun (which is ninety-three million miles from the earth) and

The attention given to the side of the head which has received the injury, in connection with a specific reference to the side of the body nervously affected, is in itself evidence that in this case the ancient surgeon was already beginning observations on the localization of functions in the brain.

Biology, list history, is not built with 'if's.

The fate of the physiology of the brain is independent of the truth and falsity of my assertions relative to the laws of the organization of the nervous system, in general, and of the brain in particular, just as the knowledge of the functions of a sense is independent of the knowledge of the structure of its apparatus.

Not untill all babies are born from glass jars will the combat cease between mother and son. But in a totalitarian future that has removed procreation from woman's hands, there will also be no affect and no art. Men will be machines, without pain but also without pleasure. Imagination has a price, which we are paying every day. There is no escape from the biologic chains that bind us.

I believed that it might be pulling these different impressions of itself from my mind and projecting them back at me, as a form of camouflage. To thwart the biologist in me, to frustrate the logic left in me.

The Everglades was the only place on earth where alligators (broad snout, fresh water, darker skin) and crocodiles (pointy snout, salt water, toothy grin) lived side by side. It was the only home of the Everglades mink, Okeechobee gourd, and Big Cypress fox squirrel. It had carnivorous plants, amphibious birds, oysters that grew on trees, cacti that grew in water, lizards that changed colors, and fish that changed genders. It had 1,100 species of trees and plants, 350 birds, and 52 varieties of

Carson was persuaded that many experts either failed to recognize or chose to ignore the potential hazards of pesticides. She was convinced that the weight of her scientific evidence would defeat the skeptics among them. And once the public had the necessary information, citizens could make informed decisions about what Carson believed was a matter of life and death.

She could not be silent even if the men of science, many of them smug experts in white lab coats who promised “better living through chemistry,” dismissed her warnings as feminine hysteria.

We are not victims of our genes, but masters of our fates, able to create lives overflowing with peace, happiness, and love.

Much of the geographical work of the past hundred years... has either explicitly or implicitly taken its inspiration from biology, and in particular Darwin. Many of the original Darwinians, such as Hooker, Wallace, Huxley, Bates, and Darwin himself, were actively concerned with geographical exploration, and it was largely facts of geographical distribution in a spatial setting which provided Darwin with the germ of his theory.

Water is one of the least understood aspects of biology.

It is shown that the golden ratio plays a prominent role in the dimensions of all objects which exhibit five-fold symmetry. It is also showed that among the irrational numbers, the golden ratio is the most irrational and, as a result, has unique applications in number theory, search algorithms, the minimization of functions, network theory, the atomic structure of certain materials and the growth of biological organisms.

At the atomic level, matter does not even exist with certainty; it only exists as a tendency to exist.

We are at the dawn of a new era, the era of 'molecular biology' as I like to call it, and there is an urgency about the need for more intensive application of physics and chemistry, and specially of structure analysis, that is still not sufficiently appreciated.

As relates to life on Earth, the fine structure constant determines how solar radiation is absorbed in our atmosphere, and it also applies to how photosynthesis works in plants.

In a sense, the Earth is mounting an immune response against the human species. It is beginning to react to the human parasite, the flooding infection of people, the dead spots of the concrete all over the planet, the cancerous rot-outs in Europe, Japan and the United States, thick with replicating primates, the colonies enlarging and spreading and threatening to shock the biosphere with mass extinctions. Perhaps the biosphere does not 'like' the idea of five billion humans.

It has been demonstrated that a species of penicillium produces in culture a very powerful antibacterial substance which affects different bacteria in different degrees. Generally speaking it may be said that the least sensitive bacteria are the Gram-negative bacilli, and the most susceptible are the pyogenic cocci ... In addition to its possible use in the treatment of bacterial infections penicillin is certainly useful... for its power of inhibiting unwanted microbes in bacterial cultures so t

Disease may be defined as 'A change produced in living things in consequence of which they are no longer in harmony with their environment.

I studied calculus for the first time, which to me was an amazingly empowering experience which I could really see how you could understand all sorts of things, and I decided that chemistry and biology just had too much memory for me to be interested. Physics was very easy.

Survive, survive and survive – these are the quintessential laws of Nature. But survive does not always mean being mean.

The evolutionists, piercing beneath the show of momentary stability, discovered, hidden in rudimentary organs, the discarded rubbish of the past. They detected the reptile under the lifted feathers of the bird, the lost terrestrial limbs dwindling beneath the blubber of the giant cetaceans. They saw life rushing outward from an unknown center, just as today the astronomer senses the galaxies fleeing into the infinity of darkness. As the spinning galactic clouds hurl stars and worlds across the n

I find it far more awesome, wonderful, that creation; our appearance in the world; should be the culmination, or at least one of the latest products of 3,000 Million years of organic evolution, than a kind of country trick, taking a rib out of a man's side in a trance.

She had a theory that the fear of getting in trouble was what made her not as good a programmer and that, in fact, it was all linked to testosterone, and that was why there were more guy programmers than women. It was a very hazy theory, and she didn't like it, but she had pretty much convinced herself it was true, although she couldn't bear to think of sharing it with anybody, because it was a lot better to think that there were social reasons why girls didn't usually become code monkeys than t

What a mistake that had been, to create a construct [AI] that could suffer. He knew that now. Life, pain, death, they were no playthings. Biology was serious business, not for amateurs and foolish gods.

Not only in antiquity but in our own times also laws have been passed...to secure good conditions for workers; so it is right that the art of medicine should contribute its portion for the benefit and relief of those for whom the law has shown such foresight...[We] ought to show peculiar zeal...in taking precautions for their safety. I for one have done all that lay in my power, and have not thought it beneath me to step into workshops of the meaner sort now and again and study the obscure opera

In Galapagos, as elsewhere, things of the mind, including intellectual ramifications from evolutionary theory, and things of the spirit, like the feeling one gets from a Queen Anne’s lace of stars in the moonless Galapagean sky, struggle toward accommodation with an elementary desire for material comfort…because so many regard this archipelago as preeminently a terrain of the mind and spirit, a locus of biological thought and psychological rejuvenation. The sheer strength of Darwin’s insight int

Plants can be affected by stray voltage and they may show stunted growth, deformed growth, or go dormant. In extreme cases they may die.

There is a time and place for electromagnetic shielding and I regard it as a last resort due to the long term biological problems that I have observed with it over the years in plant growth experiments.

My own experience of over 60 years in biomedical research amply demonstrated that without the use of animals and of human beings, it would have been impossible to acquire the important knowledge needed to prevent much suffering and premature death not only among humans but also among [other] animals.

I predict we will abolish suffering throughout the living world. Our descendants will be animated by gradients of genetically pre-programmed well-being that are orders of magnitude richer than today's peak experiences.

Scholarship that is indifferent to human suffering is immoral.

I personally cannot discern a shred of evidence for ‘[intelligent] design.’ If 97% of all creatures have gone extinct, some plan isn't working very well!

Permanence of instinct must go with permanence of form...The history of the present must teach us the history of the past.[Referring to studying fossil remains of the weevil, largely unchanged to the present day.]

Darwin, with his Origin of Species, his theories about Natural Selection, the Survival of the Fittest, and the influence of environment, shed a flood of light upon the great problems of plant and animal life.These things had been guessed, prophesied, asserted, hinted by many others, but Darwin, with infinite patience, with perfect care and candor, found the facts, fulfilled the prophecies, and demonstrated the truth of the guesses, hints and assertions. He was, in my judgment, the keenest observ

We need science education to produce scientists, but we need it equally to create literacy in the public. Man has a fundamental urge to comprehend the world about him, and science gives today the only world picture which we can consider as valid. It gives an understanding of the inside of the atom and of the whole universe, or the peculiar properties of the chemical substances and of the manner in which genes duplicate in biology. An educated layman can, of course, not contribute to science, but

Fifty years from now if an understanding of man's origins, his evolution, his history, his progress is not in the common place of the school books we shall not exist.

If a single cell, under appropriate conditions, becomes a man in the space of a few years, there can surely be no difficulty in understanding how, under appropriate conditions, a cell may, in the course of untold millions of years, give origin to the human race.

Fleshers used to spin fantasies about aliens arriving to ‘conquer’ Earth, to steal their ‘precious’ physical resources, to wipe them out for fear of ‘competition’…as if a species capable of making the journey wouldn’t have had the power, or the wit, or the imagination, to rid itself of obsolete biological imperatives. Conquering the Galaxy is what bacteria with spaceships would do – knowing no better, having no choice.

Even though it is common knowledge in our field of Neuroscience, I take immense pleasure every time I realize that our perception of the whole universe emerges from the activity of the little specks of jelly inside our skull.

When General Genius built the first mentar [Artificial Intelligence] mind in the last half of the twenty-first century, it based its design on the only proven conscious material then known, namely, our brains. Specifically, the complex structure of our synaptic network. Scientists substituted an electrochemical substrate for our slower, messier biological one. Our brains are an evolutionary hodgepodge of newer structures built on top of more ancient ones, a jury-rigged system that has gotten us

Consciousness is the chronic pain of life, and all higher organisms suffer it every waking moment.

Suddenly I realized that a cell's life is controlled by the physical and energetic environment and not by its genes. Genes are simply molecular blueprints used in the construction of cells, tissues, and organs. The environment serves as a "contractor" who reads and engages those genetic blueprints and is ultimately responsible for the character of a cell's life. It is a single cell's "awareness" of the environment, not its genes, that sets into motion the mechanisms of life.

Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection determined the evolution of cultures in the same manner as it did that of species.

In microbiology the roles of mutation and selection in evolution are coming to be better understood through the use of bacterial cultures of mutant strains.

In real life there is no such person as the average man. There are only particular men, women and children, each with his or her inborn idiosyncrasies of mind and body, and all trying (or becoming compelled) to squeeze their biological diversities into the uniformity of some cultural mold.

How can we distinguish what is biologically determined from what people merely try to justify through biological myths? A good rule of thumb is ‘Biology enables, Culture forbids.’ Biology is willing to tolerate a very wide spectrum of possibilities. It’s culture that obliges people to realize some possibilities while forbidding others. Biology enables women to have children – some cultures oblige women to realize this possibility. Biology enables men to enjoy sex with one another – some cultures

No existing form of anthropoid ape is even remotely related to the stock which has given rise to man.

Perhaps if zoologists would contemplate the wide variations presented by many plants of indubitably one and the same species, and the still wider diversities of long cultivated races from an original stock, they would find more than one instructive parallel to the case of the longest domesticated of all species, man.

Man is a product of nature, a part of the Universe. The Universe is operated under exact natural laws. Man is a product of millions of years of evolution. He adapts himself to the laws of nature or he perishes.

The difference between bush and ladder also allows us to put a lid on a fruitless and boring debate. That debate is over what qualifies as True Language. One side lists some qualities that human language has but that no animal has yet demonstrated: reference, use of symbols displaced of in time and space from their referents, creativity, categorical speech perception, consistent ordering, hierarchical structure, infinity, recursion, and so on. The other side finds some counter-example in the ani

Life for me is just a result of experiments being performed by far more developed creatures.

...on opening the incubator I experienced one of those rare moments of intense emotion which reward the research worker for all his pains: at first glance I saw that the broth culture, which the night before had been very turbid was perfectly clear: all the bacteria had vanished... as for my agar spread it was devoid of all growth and what caused my emotion was that in a flash I understood: what causes my spots was in fact an invisible microbe, a filterable virus, but a virus parasitic on bacter

It is, however, a most astonishing but incontestable fact, that the history of the evolution of man as yet constitutes no part of general education. Indeed, our so-called 'educated classes' are to this day in total ignorance of the most important circumstances and the most remarkable phenomena which Anthropogeny has brought to light.

Science, as long as it limits itself to the descriptive study of the laws of nature, has no moral or ethical quality and this applies to the physical as well as the biological sciences.

In AP Bio, I learned that the cells in our body are replaced every seven years, which means that one day, I'll have a body full of cells that were never sick. But it also means that parts of me that knew and loved Sadie will disappear. I'll still remember loving her, but it'll be a different me who loved her. And maybe this is how we move on. We grow new cells to replace the grieving ones, diluting our pain until it loses potency.The percentage of my skin that touched hers will lessen until one

One of my friends compared me to Bruce Banner, due to my work with radiation and human health. So I looked up Bruce Banner and this is what I found: Banner, a physicist, is sarcastic and seemingly very self-assured when he first appears in Incredible Hulk #1, but is also emotionally withdrawn in most fashions...Banner is considered one of the greatest scientific minds on Earth, possessing "a mind so brilliant it cannot be measured on any known intelligence test." He holds expertise in biology, c

Healing is a biological process, not an art. It is as much a function of the living organism as respiration, digestion, circulation, excretion, cell proliferation, or nerve activity. It is a ceaseless process, as constant as the turning of the earth on its axis. Man can neither duplicate nor imitate nor provide a substitute for the process. All schools of healing are frauds.

For who could better describe the eye than God, Who made it? But as it is clearer than the day that God has left a good deal to our own efforts ... we should really follow in these things the thread of nature, by which first principles, reason and daily experience lead us. Therefore, He prompts the minds of great men to inquire into the nature which He created, and He furthers and conducts their studies. These things must be enough to us, and from Holy Scripture we should seek in the first place

Advocacy of leaf protein as a human food is based on the undisputed fact that forage crops (such as lucerne) give a greater yield of protein than other types of crops. Even with conventional food crops there is more protein in the leafy parts than in the seeds or tubs that are usually harvested.

Originally, the atoms of carbon from which we’re made were floating in the air, part of a carbon dioxide molecule. The only way to recruit these carbon atoms for the molecules necessary to support life—the carbohydrates, amino acids, proteins, and lipids—is by means of photosynthesis. Using sunlight as a catalyst the green cells of plants combine carbon atoms taken from the air with water and elements drawn from the soil to form the simple organic compounds that stand at the base of every food c

Stalin’s teachings about gradual, concealed, unnoticeable quantitative changes leading to rapid, radical, qualitative changes permitted Soviet biologists to discover in plants the realization of such qualitative transitions that one species could be transformed into another’… The slide away from truth-directed science had disastrous results in agriculture. It was also humanly disastrous. Biologists who disagreed were shot or imprisoned.

If you allow a creek to go back to being a creek, if you let the trees and the bramble get overgrown, and you let the stream overrun its banks whenever it wants to, the wetland will take care of itself. The water that trickles into the ocean will be clean and pristine if everything is just left alone to work the way it was designed to work. Earthworms have shown that they can take care of the soil in the same way that a wetland takes care of the water. Nature regenerates. It Cleans. It hides a m

They are near the bottom of the food chain - a meal for fish and birds - while humans eat from the top of the food chain, consuming an astonishing array of what lies on the planet. But eventually, even we become food for the worms. Shakespeare saw this connection, writing in Hamlet, "A man may fish with a worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of a fish that hath fed of that worm.

I had long ago stopped believing in promises. Biological imperatives, yes. Environmental factors, yes. Promises, no.

Biologists will teach us that the survival of the species depends on cooperation, not competition.

Before the girl and the boy tie the knot, they feel like falling in love. And most of them do. Cupid works. Biology demands. And, sociology warrants.

No, Carolyn, you can’t petition PETA to get a waiver from dissecting the frog. The frog’s already dead. It donated itself to science. Don’t let its sacrifice be in vain. -Brandon

It wasn’t that we started to look at things because there was now a mechanism by which to see them. There first had to be a will to see, buried somewhere inside living things. Without it, the mechanism would never have taken shape.

Heavy resistance strength training (loads > 85% 1RM) appears to evoke significant gains in maximal eccentric muscle strength.

The foreign policy aim of ants can be summed up as follows: restless aggression, territorial conquest, and genocidal annihilation of neighboring colonies whenever possible. If ants had nuclear weapons, they would probably end the world in a week.

In the ensuing chapters, we will look in some detail at particular manifestations of the modern scientific ideology and the false paths down which it has led us. We will consider how biological determinism has been used to explain and justify inequalities within and between societies and to claim that those inequalities can never be changed. We will see how a theory of human nature has been developed using Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection to claim that social organization is als

...we do not own these woods. They own us.

I knew I was going to be a cellular biologist whose research would focus on scrutinizing every nuance of the cell's ultrastructure to gain insights into the secrets of cellular life.

TP53 seems to encode the greater good, like a suicide pill in the mouth of a soldier that dissolves only when it detects evidence that he is about to mutiny.

The virus altered the the eye of the beholder. That this change came at the expense of the beheld suggests that beauty in nature does not necessarily bespeak health, nor necessarily redound to the benefit of the beautiful.

Our terminal decline into old age and death stems from the fine print of the contract that we signed with our mitochondria two billion years ago.

The outgroup is rocks.

in human males, testosterone appears to promote behavior intended to dominate other people. This behavior can be expressed aggressively, even violently, as well as nonaggressively. Testosterone levels, even a single baseline measurement, correlate well with dominance behavior, that is, testosterone not only affects dominance behavior but also responds to it.

winning or losing an agonist encounter has a dramatic impact on future aggressive behavior. Winners are more likely to initiate attacks against unknown opponents, whereas losers are more circumspect and likely to retreat from unfamiliar conspecifics, adopting an opportunistic strategy, picking and choosing their fights. In the worst case scenario, animals socially subjugated by constant threat and attack from dominant conspecifics develop a submissive phenotype, showing little or no aggressive b

Biogeography typically trumps taxonomy and anticipates molecular phylogeny

For humans—trapped in biology—there was no mercy: we lived a while, we fussed around for a bit and died, we rotted in the ground like garbage.

It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons

Intelligence is the ability of a species to live in harmony with its environment.

If you happen to be one of the people who has a split zygomaticus major muscle, where the lower part of it is tethered to the overlying skin, this will create a dimple in your cheek when you smile.

Imagine a house coming together spontaneously from all the information contained in the bricks: that is how animal bodies are made.

God is an energy, rather than an anthropomorphic being, and God's language is biology. Red blood cells, the principle of magnetic attraction, neurological synapse: each is a miracle, and in each is the presence and flow of God.

People, as curious primates, dote on concrete objects that can be seen and fondled. God dwells among the details, not in the realm of pure generality. We must tackle and grasp the larger, encompassing themes of our universe, but we make our best approach through small curiosities that rivet our attention - all those pretty pebbles on the shoreline of knowledge. For the ocean of truth washes over the pebbles with every wave, and they rattle and clink with the most wondrous din.