Quotes About Biologist

Phoebus Levene was characteristically blunt: 'Nucleic acids carry no individuality, no specificity . . . It may be just to accept the conclusion of the biologist that they do not determine species specificity, nor are they carriers of the Mendelian characters.

As for memes, the word 'meme' is a cliche, which is to say it's already a meme. We all hear it all the time, and maybe we even have started to use it in ordinary speech. The man who invented it was Richard Dawkins, who was, not coincidentally, an evolutionary biologist. And he invented it as an analog for the gene.

Very long ago our ancestors had moral systems. Our current institutions are only a couple of thousand years old, which is really not old in the eyes of a biologist.

I am speaking, as I know it is rude to do, of the Social Darwinists, the eugenicists, the Imperialists, the Scientific Socialists who showed such firmness in reshaping civilization in Eastern Europe, China, Cambodia, and elsewhere, and, yes, of the Nazis. Darwin influenced the nationalist writer Heinrich von Treitschke and the biologist Ernst Haeckel, who influenced Hitler and also the milieu in which he flourished.

With his back turned on the life-giving sea, he eventually sets off waddling toward the mountains of the interior. There's more disturbing footage from polar regions, but it's the implications that needle at me. The penguin's journey is certain death. Were they to catch him and bring him back, the biologist explains, he would only head for the mountains again. It sounds like the voice of experience, as if they've tried and failed. The penguins refuse to be saved.

In their natural habitats some of these species may be, like the golden-fronted bowerbird, easy to locate and observe but may nevertheless trick the biologist into treating them as "common" when they are really just "obvious," an important distinction.

That said, a fireball like the one hurtling towards us was worthy of the utmost respect. To adopt the jargon of commercial managers, this was a Premium-Class Fireball. Speaking in poetic terms, it was a Tsar-Fireball. A biologist would have said it was an Alpha-Fireball. As a cool, calculating mathematician might have remarked, it was a fireball with a diameter of about three metres. It was a fireball fearsome enough to make you shit yourself!

Not long ago, a whale biologist named Phillip Clapham sent me a photograph that illustrates the consequences of life without a doorman. Like most creatures that swallow their food whole, sperm whales have a limited-to-nonexistent sense of taste. The photo is a black-and-white still life of twenty-five objects recovered from sperm whale stomachs. It's like Jonah set up housekeeping: a pitcher, a cup, a tube of toothpaste, a strainer, a wastebasket, a shoe, a decorative figurine.

The biologist J.B.S. Haldane once said that there are two reasons why humans do not turn into angels: moral imperfection and a body plan that cannot accommodate both arms and wings.

There is no refutation of Darwinian evolution in existence. If a refutation ever were to come about, it would come from a scientist, and not an idiot.

The British molecular biologist Rosalind Franklin, who played a central part in discovering the structure of DNA but suffered from the heavy chauvinism of her male colleagues.

I'm friends with James Cameron. We've spent time together over the years because he is a diver and explorer and in his heart of hearts a biologist. We run into each other at scientific conferences.

Brandeis is so fast and loose and informal, I didn't have any problem offering a history course as a biologist. The barriers would be far more formidable, unscalable, at other institutions. But this is a user-friendly place. It's 'Shmedrik University' - that's a Yiddish word for even worse than schlemiel.

Charles Regis Perrone was a biologist by default. Medical school had been his first goal--specifically, a leisurely career in radiology. The promise of wealth had attracted him to health care, but as a devoted hypochondriac he was repelled by the idea of interacting with actual sick people.

Robin fled the room. Back in the main lab, she stood with her back against the wall, eyes closed, gasping. Let me guess. The selkie—male? Rick's tone was politely inquisitive. The flush on Robin's face became one of embarrassment. So much for the biologist and her professional demeanor. Yes. Yes, he is. They have a knack for that. A knack for what? Flustering young women out of their wits. The Temptation of Robin Green

I just was mesmerized by all of this life everywhere I looked. And so I wanted to be a marine biologist.

Already, boar are being killed here by the Forestry Commission and other owners at rates that could wipe them out. Among the commission's justifications is that they cause 'substantial damage' to woodlands.17 What does this mean? The notion of damage to native ecosystems by a native species at numbers well below its natural population is nonsensical. What the Forestry Commission calls damage a biologist calls natural processes.

A business man who was also a biologist and a sociologist would know, approximately, the right thing to do for humanity. But, outside the realm of business, these men are stupid. They know only business. They do not know mankind nor society, and yet they set themselves up as arbiters of the fates of the hungry millions and all the other millions thrown in. History, some day, will have an excruciating laugh at their expense. I was not surprised when I had my

I would love to be a field biologist. I would love to do what Jane Goodall did, just totally immerse myself in the life of one specific species for years and study every aspect of its behavior until little by little, all of these patterns become clear. That would be great, but I don't know if I have it left in me.

This one was called Ark Madiba, after a Moiran biologist of the Fourth Millennium who had in turn been named in memory of a hero of Old Earth.

The shelves of many evangelicals are full of books that point out the flaws in evolution, discuss it only as a theory, and almost imply that there's a conspiracy here to avoid the fact that evolution is actually flawed. All of those books, unfortunately, are based upon conclusions that no reasonable biologist would now accept.

Everyone and everything we know and love. Thanks to a virus. We all carry mutations. Genetic mutations can give you laser vision. Or cancer. Or color blindness. Sometimes a mutation is on a DNA strand that doesn't do anything at all. And sometimes-- almost never-- a genetic mutation will cause an entire species to make an evolutionary leap forward. Think about it... a virus with powers. Sounds like something a biologist would want to protect.

People listened to whale songs, and politicians listened to the whale-song listening people and, then, finally, acted on the warnings of the population biologist Cassandras. The

I grew up down in Florida, and in the Keys, there's this place called Sea Camp which was not unlike Space Camp, except you explored the sea. And so that kind of whetted my appetite for that. But then I ended up swimming in a lagoon full of Cassiopeia jellyfish, and that quickly quashed that desire to be a marine biologist.