Quotes About Organisms

Perhaps genes did regulate the aging process. Perhaps different organisms had different life spans because a universal regulatory 'clock' was set to run at different speeds in different species.

The existence of common features in different forms of life indicates some relationship between the different organisms, and according to the concept of evolution, these relations stem from the circumstance that the higher organisms, in the course of millions of years, have gradually evolved from simpler ones.

For the rest of the earth's organisms, existence is relatively uncomplicated. Their lives are about three things: survival, reproduction, death—and nothing else.

A comprehensively reductive conception is favored by the belief that the propensity for the development of organisms with a subjective view must have been there from the beginning, just as the propensity for the formation of atoms, molecules, galaxies, and organic compounds must have been there from the beginning.

If we continue to assume that we are parts of the physical world and that the evolutionary process that brought us into existence is part of its history, then something must be added to the physical conception of the natural order that allows us to explain how it can give rise to organisms that are more than physical. The resources of physical science are not adequate for this purpose, because those resources were developed to account for data of a completely different kind.

Indeed, phage viruses are by far the most plentiful biological entity on earth. There are 1031 of them—a trillion phages for every grain of sand, and more than all organisms (including bacteria) combined. In one milliliter (0.03 ounces) of seawater there can be as many as 900 million of these viruses.7

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.

We carry stores of DNA in our nuclei that may have come in, at one time or another, from the fusion of ancestral cells and the linking of ancestral organisms in symbiosis. Our genomes are catalogues of instructions from all kinds of sources in nature, filed for all kinds of contingencies.

one cubic foot of tidepool can support more than four thousand living things.

The second biological lesson of history is that life is selection. In the competition for food or mates or power some organisms succeed and some fail. In the struggle for existence some individuals are better equipped than others to meet the tests of survival.

The third biological lesson of history is that life must breed. Nature has no use for organisms, variations, or groups that cannot reproduce abundantly.

Empedocles (fl. 445 B.C., in Sicily) developed to a further stage the idea of evolution.17 Organs arise not by design but by selection. Nature makes many trials and experiments with organisms, combining organs variously; where the combination meets environmental needs the organism survives and perpetuates its like; where the combination fails, the organism is weeded out; as time goes on, organisms are more and more intricately and successfully adapted to their surroundings.

Power, in Case's world, meant corporate power. The zaibatsus, the multinationals that shaped the course of human history, had transcended old barriers. Viewed as organisms, they had attained a kind of immortality. You couldn't kill a zaibatsu by assassinating a dozen key executives; there were others waiting to step up the ladder, assume the vacated position, access the vast banks of corporate memory...

Power, in Case's world, meant corporate power. The zaibatsus, the multinationals that shaped the course of human history, had transcended old barriers. Viewed as organisms, they had attained a kind of immortality. You couldn't kill a zaibatsu by assassinating a dozen key executives; there were others waiting to step up the ladder, assume the vacated position, access the vast banks of corporate memory.

Man is a mass of correspondences, and because of these, because he is alive to countless objects and influences to which lower organisms are dead, he is the most living of all creatures.

The scientific knowledge that unleashed atomic energy brought genuine insight into the structure of the entire cosmos and in recent years has broken down the gap between pre-organic matter, once regarded as fatally inert and passive, and living organisms.

Paradoxically, then, the greatest gains that have been achieved through command of nuclear reaction have been purely spiritual ones: an enriched conception of cosmic realities: a deeper insight into the nature of the universe and of the place that living organisms, and finally man himself, have come to occupy.

If hunting is by definition a predatory occupation, gardening is a symbiotic one; and in the loose ecological pattern of the early garden, the interdependence of living organisms became visible, and the direct involvement of man was the very condition for productivity and creativity.

We are evolutionary descendents of this marvellous panoply of life. And what that says unequivocally is we have an utter total obligation to make sure we have an environment that not only is good for us but is good for all living organisms.

The haunting of history is ever present in Barcelona. 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.

Digital organisms, while not necessarily any more alive than a phone book, are strings of code that replicate and evolve over time. Digital codes are strings of binary digits - bits.

There's nothing like evolution for engineering beautiful organisms.

What I was concerned with was life: what are the major features that are common to all living organisms that subtly define life. So I looked at the whole problem as a chemist, as a biochemist, and as a molecular biologist.

Algae are such basic, simple organisms.