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Biology Quotes

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Biology Quotes

“The journalist Richard Neville was frighteningly accurate when, in summarising the desperate state of our species’ situation, he wrote that ‘We are locked in a race between self destruction and self discovery’. ONLY ‘self discovery’ — this reconciling, ameliorating, psychologically healing understanding of ourselves — can save us from ‘self destruction’.”

PsychologyBiologyHuman BehaviourJeremy Griffith
Book:Freedom: The End of the Human Condition
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“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.”

TruthBiologyStalinismBelief SystemObjective Truth
Book:Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century
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“I am above the forest region, amongst grand rocks & such a torrent as you see in Salvator Rosa's paintings vegetation all a scrub of rhodos. with Pines below me as thick & bad to get through as our Fuegian Fagi on the hill tops, & except the towering peaks of P. S. [perpetual snow] that, here shoot up on all hands there is little difference in the mt scenery—here however the blaze of Rhod. flowers and various colored jungle proclaims a differently constituted region in a naturalist's eye & twenty species here, to one there, always are asking me the vexed question, where do we come from? [Letter to Charles Darwin 24 Jun 1849]”

ScienceNatureBiologySceneryNaturalismPlantsOrigin Of LifeRosaOrigin Of SpeciesDarwinCharles DarwinSalvator Rosa
Book:Life and Letters of Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker O.M., G.C.S.I.
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“Life, from the moment it began on this planet covered by a delicate and fragile atmosphere, has had to battle against countless challenges that threaten its very survival every single second. Beyond this thin layer of air, life, as we know it, cannot exist. Therefore, we must protect our lives fiercely, like shielding a flame from the wind or preserving a beautiful bubble from bursting, or like a dew drop sparkling in the morning sun that we don’t want to let fall. We need to cherish this life intensely and intimately.”

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Book:For Humans To Know: New Revised Edition
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“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 multitude of sins.”

BiologyEarth ScienceAnimal ScienceEarthworm
Book:The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms
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“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.”

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Author:Amy Stewart
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“​I wanted to present Neuroscience to people in a way that would diminish their differences.”

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Book:Love, God & Neurons: Memoir of a scientist who found himself by getting lost
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“The Biology of Tribalism concerns pushes and pulls between populations, which primarily occur due to tradeoffs between inbreeding and outbreeding. Ethnocentrism and other tribalistic personality facets have evolved to influence mate choice and encourage “optimal outbreeding.” The book will explore these and other tribalistic political phenomena that impact the evolution of populations, including gender inequality, warfare, and genocide. The Biology of Family Conflict (Parent-Offspring Conflict) is the field of evolutionary theory that explains why the interests of the most closely related individuals do not always align, and thus why different family disciplinary strategies exist. The two opposed disciplinary models are based on egalitarian and hierarchical moralities. These conflicts are linked to the variation in people's tolerance of inequality. The Biology of Altruism and Self-Interest is the area of evolutionary theory that describes how and why people cooperate with and betray one another; this field sheds light on why some people perceive human nature so differently than others.”

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Book:Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us
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“Foreign biochemists who adhere to metaphysical idealist concepts, ascribe to mythical immutable genes the role of governing metabolic processes which, properly speaking, constitute the characteristic feature of life. Soviet biology has counterposed to these idealist concepts, a real, scientifically consistent materialist explanation of vital processes based on concrete experimental data. Let me cite as an example only one tendency in these investigations, namely, the study of the primary role played in all these complex manifestations of life by special substances called enzymes. Along with vitamins and hormones they constitute the group of compounds which direct all the changes lying at the basis of metabolism in the living organism. Enzymes are the real keys to life. All component substances of the organism—phosphorous compounds, fats, carbon-hydrates, etc. — would be inactive if they were not influenced by enzymes. Without the digestive enzymes, starch would be converted into sugar not in ten minutes, as it is in our body, but in scores of months. Without respiratory enzymes, the organism would be doomed to death from asphyxiation even in an atmosphere of pure oxygen.”

BiologyHormonesVitaminsMetabolismEnzymesSoviet ScienceAnti GenesProletarian Science
Book:New paths of Soviet science: Notes on latest research of Soviet scientists
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“Not to use bacteria as model organisms for more complex animals, but the reverse: to literally make complex animals more like their model organisms, by making living matter conform to the shape, time, and technical forms of simpler experimental models.”

HistoryBiologyMicroorganismsLife SciencesCytologyBiological TimeCell FusionLab AnthropologyModel Organism
Book:Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies
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“Very often conditions are recorded as observable "under thy fingers" [...] Among such observations it is important to notice that the pulsations of the human heart are observed.”

BiologyHuman HeartPulseAnatomyAncient EgyptMedical HistoryPhilologyHieroglyphicAncient Medicine
Book:The Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus, Vol 1: Hieroglyphic Transliteration, Translation and Commentary
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“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.”

BrainBiologyNeuroscienceAnatomyAncient EgyptMedical HistoryInjuriesHieroglyphicAncient Medicine
Book:The Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus, Vol 1: Hieroglyphic Transliteration, Translation and Commentary
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“[...] we have in our treatise a series of fifty-seven examinations, almost exclusively of injuries of the human body forming a group of observations furnishing us with the earliest known nucleus of fact regarding the anatomy, physiology and pathology of the human body. Crude and elementary as they are, the method by which they were collected was scientific, and these observations, together with the diagnoses and the explanatory commentary in the ancient glosses, form the oldest body of science now extant.”

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Book:The Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus, Vol 1: Hieroglyphic Transliteration, Translation and Commentary
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“In describing a protein it is now common to distinguish the primary, secondary and tertiary structures. The primary structure is simply the order, or sequence, of the amino-acid residues along the polypeptide chains. This was first determined by [Frederick] Sanger using chemical techniques for the protein insulin, and has since been elucidated for a number of peptides and, in part, for one or two other small proteins. The secondary structure is the type of folding, coiling or puckering adopted by the polypeptide chain: the a-helix structure and the pleated sheet are examples. Secondary structure has been assigned in broad outline to a number of librous proteins such as silk, keratin and collagen; but we are ignorant of the nature of the secondary structure of any globular protein. True, there is suggestive evidence, though as yet no proof, that a-helices occur in globular proteins, to an extent which is difficult to gauge quantitatively in any particular case. The tertiary structure is the way in which the folded or coiled polypeptide chains are disposed to form the protein molecule as a three-dimensional object, in space. The chemical and physical properties of a protein cannot be fully interpreted until all three levels of structure are understood, for these properties depend on the spatial relationships between the amino-acids, and these in turn depend on the tertiary and secondary structures as much as on the primary. Only X-ray diffraction methods seem capable, even in principle, of unravelling the tertiary and secondary structures. [Co-author with G. Bodo, H. M. Dintzis, R. G. Parrish, H. Wyckoff, and D. C. Phillips]”

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Author:John Kendrew
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“So, Rosalind became a symbol, first of an argumentative swot, then of a downtrodden woman scientist, and finally of a triumphant heroine in a man's world. She was none of these things and would have hated all of them. She was simply a very good scientist with an ambition, as she told Colin from her hospital bed, to be a Fellow of the Royal Society before she was 40. But she died at thirty-seven.”

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Book:My Sister Rosalind Franklin
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“Evidently neither cats nor dogs, nor other animals that listen to human music, were constituted for the appreciation of it, for it is not of the slightest use to them in the struggle for existence. Moreover, they and their organs of hearing were much older than man and his music. Their power of appreciating music is therefore an uncontemplated side-faculty of a hearing apparatus which has become on other grounds what we find it to be. So it is, I believe, with man. He has not acquired his musical hearing as such, but has received a highly developed organ of hearing by a process of selection, because it was necessary to him in the selective process ; and this organ of hearing happens also to be adapted to listening to music.”

ScienceMusicEvolutionBiologyNatural SelectionSurivivalSelections
Author:August Weismann
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“[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.”

EvolutionIntelligenceBiologyHuman BrainNatural IntelligenceCognitive EvolutionHuman Exceptionalism
Book:Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies
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“Who gave the decisive deathblow to the argument from design on the basis of biological complexity? Both philosophers and biologists are divided on this point (Oppy 1996; Dawkins 1986; Sober 2008). Some have claimed that the biological design argument did not falter until Darwin provided a proper naturalistic explanation for adaptive complexity; others maintain that David Hume had already shattered the argument to pieces by sheer logical force several decades earlier, in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (Hume 2007 [1779]). Elliott Sober has been among the philosophers who maintain that, as Hume was not in a position to offer a serious alternative explanation of adaptive complexity, it is hardly surprising that 'intelligent people strongly favored the design hypothesis' (Sober 2000, 36). In his most recent book, however, Sober (2008) carefully develops what he thinks is the most charitable reconstruction of the design argument, and proceeds to show why it is defective for intrinsic reasons (for earlier version of this argument, see Sober 1999, 2002). Sober argues that the design argument can be rejected even without the need to consider alternative explanations for adaptive complexity (Sober 2008, 126): 'To see why the design argument is defective, there is no need to have a view as to whether Darwin’s theory of evolution is true' (Sober 2008, 154).”

ScienceAtheismEvolutionComplexityBiologyTheory Of EvolutionDarwinCharles DarwinDavid HumeRichard DawkinsDawkinsBiological ComplexityArgument For AtheismDeathblowGraham OppyArgument From Design RefutedAtheistic ArgumentDesign Argument RefutedElliott SoberIntelligent Design Refuted
Author:Maarten Boudry
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“Darwin's theory was received in Russia with profound sympathy. While in Western Europe it met firmly established old traditions which it had first to overcome, in Russia its appearance coincided with the awakening of our society after the Crimean War and here it immediately received the status of full citizenship and ever since has enjoyed widespread popularity.”

ScienceTheoryEvolutionRussiaBiologySympathyPopularityCitizenshipScientific TheoryTheory Of EvolutionDarwinWestern EuropeCharles DarwinCrimean War
Author:Vladimir Onufrievich Kovalevskiĭ
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“it is high time we stop using the term “theory” while mentioning Evolution. The term “theory” somehow makes some people think of Evolution as an unproven “hypothesis”. Theory of Evolution is an incontrovertible fact of science. It is not a fictitious story like Creationism. It’s a hard reality. It is the bed-rock of Biology. Defying evolution means defying one’s own existence as a human being.”

ScienceEvolutionBrainy QuotesBiologyDarwinismTheory Of Evolution
Book:Homo: A Brief History of Consciousness
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“I have a little urge to all the rational thinkers in the world, both scientists and non-scientists. Because of the fact that many of the scientists and science communicators still use the phrase “Theory of Evolution”, the general population still quite mistakenly hail Evolution as some sort of unproven hypothesis. So, we need to change that. The only way to do that, is stop using the word “Theory” along with “Evolution”. It’s been long since we have proven Evolution to be not just a hypothesis, but an empirical truth. Since the publication of Charles Darwin’s “Origin of Species: By Means of Natural Selection” piles of evidence from various fields of biology have emerged through the painstaking efforts of scientists, and have taken Evolution from the domain of falsifiable hypotheses into the domain of scientific facts. So, evolution is not a matter of belief or opinion, it is an irrefutable fact of this natural world.”

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Book:Lord is My Sheep: Gospel of Human
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“Black magic, the magic of the primeval chaos, blots out or transmogrifies the true form of things. At the stroke of twelve the princess must flee the banquet or risk discovery in the rags of a kitchen wench; coach reverts to pumpkin. Instability lies at the heart of the world. With uncanny foresight folklore has long toyed symbolically with what the nineteenth century was to proclaim a reality - namely, that form is an illusion of the time dimension, that the magic flight of the pursued hero or heroine through frogskin and wolf coat has been, and will continue to be, the flight of all men.”

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Book:The Star Thrower
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“My practice as a scientist is atheistic. That is to say, when I set up an experiment I assume that no god, angel or devil is going to interfere with its course; and this assumption has been justified by such success as I have achieved in my professional career. I should therefore be intellectually dishonest if I were not also atheistic in the affairs of the world.”

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Book:Faith And Fact
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“The question of the position of man, as an animal, has given rise to much disputation, with the result of proving that there is no anatomical or developmental character by which he is more widely distinguished from the group of animals most nearly allied to him, than they are from one another.”

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Book:Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century, The
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“bourgeois scientists found it necessary to invent the intraspecific struggle. They say that a fierce struggle for food, of which there is an insufficiency, goes on in nature, within the species, among its individual members – a struggle for the conditions of life. The stronger, fitter individuals win. The same thing, they aver, goes on among human beings: the capitalists, you see, are brainier, are more capable by nature and heredity. We Soviet people know full well that the oppression of the working people, the domination of the capitalist class and imperialist war have nothing in common with the laws of biology. These phenomena are all governed by the laws of decaying bourgeois, capitalist society, which has outlived its day. Nor is there any intraspecific competition in nature itself.”

EvolutionCapitalismCommunismBiologySoviet UnionUssrMarxism LeninismLysenkoismMalthusianism
Book:Agro Biology
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“We’ve learned,” he says, “that over the history of our planet, Earth and life have co-evolved. Changes in the environment affect life, and changes in life can transform the environment. This is a lesson to ponder as we think about our future as well as our past.” —Andrew H. Knoll PhD— From—Cambrian Ocean World: Ancient Sea Life of North America (Life of the Past).****couldn’t find this title****”

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Author:John Foster
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