Quotes About Organisms

Jumping genes are fundamental because they're agents of change. Everybody knows that organisms evolve. What makes them evolve is that their genes are dynamic and in motion. A familiar example is the stripe-y corn - called Indian corn - that you buy in the fall.

If you look at the ecological circuitry of this planet, the ways in which materials like carbon or sulfur or phosphorous or nitrogen get cycled in ways that makes them available for our biology, the organisms that do the heavy lifting are bacteria.

Bacteria are single-celled organisms. Bacteria are the model organisms for everything that we know in higher organisms. There are 10 times more bacterial cells in you or on you than human cells.

From spending my decades thinking about behavior and the biological influences on it, I'm convinced by now free will is what we call the biology that hasn't been discovered yet. It's just another way of stating that we're biological organisms determined by the physical laws of the universe.

Even if the ocean on Enceladus starts out being as microbially poor as the pelagic ocean on Earth, which is the worst case, we still have a chance of seeing lots of organisms in the plumes.

Why does the path of institutional change differ across societies? The answer to this question lies in institutional drift. In the same way that the genes of two isolated populations of organisms will drift apart slowly because of random mutations in the so-called process of evolutionary or genetic drift, two otherwise similar societies will also drift apart institutionally—albeit, again, slowly.

To begin with, sponges are not plants. They are multi-celled animals, although they have no mouths, internal organs, brains or nervous systems. They cannot move, but they can reproduce, eat, grow and obtain Florida driver's licenses.

All knowledge systems, from modern science to those embedded in the most ancient of creation myths, can be thought of as maps of reality. They are never just true or false. Perfect descriptions of reality are unattainable, unnecessary, and too costly for learning organisms, including humans.

Just look at what happens to humans after they die-most of that is done by microbes.

Although Darwin's theory of evolution discusses how the fitter offspring tend to survive, the reality is that whether or not an offspring will survive is mostly a function of chance due to the many possible wrong choices that exist for each right choice. Higher complexity organisms have more behavioral options, which in turn enables them to make more right choices.

All the vital mechanisms, varied as they are, have only one object, that of preserving constant the conditions of life in the internal environment.

Toshiaki learned that all living organisms were governed by their DNA. He was impressed by perfection of this system.Why did existence have the ability to design such a beautiful code? And how could such a simple structure account for endless diversity of life forms?

all life forms, no matter how diverse, have common characteristics: 1) they are made up of cells, enclosed by a membrane that maintains internal conditions different from their surroundings, 2) they contain DNA or RNA as the material that carries their master plan, and 3) they carry out a process, called metabolism, which involves the conversion of different forms of energy by means of which they sustain themselves.

Evolutionary biologists are not content merely to explain how variation occurs within limits, however. They aspire to answer a much broader question-which is how complex organisms like birds, and flowers, and human beings came into existence in the first place.

Trying to understand fundamental processes that take place as organisms develop and how their various cells interact with one another - one can see what happens with those cells by asking questions about the fundamentals of biology.

Darwin based his theory on generalizations that were strictly empirical. You can go out and see that organisms do vary, that variations are inherited, and that every organism is capable of increasing its numbers in sufficiently favorable circumstances.

The reason for natural selection's great success is that it provides a satisfying explanation of how evolution might have occurred: individual organisms vary, and if those variations are inherited, the successful ones will survive and propagate and pass down their desirable traits to succeeding generations.

In an age of molecular genomics, it is ever more apparent that the fingerprints of evolution are pressed deeply into human DNA, just as they are into the genomes of every other organism. Biologists understand this, and so do students who study the science of life.

If you want to study one of these strange organisms, you had better have a good justification. It's not good to study gene organisation in some obscure insect that no one's ever heard about.

Studying organisms at a molecular level was totally compelling because it was moving from being a naturalist, which was the 19th-century kind of science, to being very focused and really getting to the heart of these molecules.

Life's great dichotomy is between autotrophs, organisms that can nourish themselves, and heterotrophs, or life forms that must feed on other organisms.

Evolution refers to change over time in organic design. Characteristics, or "design features," that help an organism to survive and reproduce, relative to other organisms with different design features, get represented in future generations more than characteristics that are neutral or that impede survival and reproduction.

It will be impossible for us to maintain the health of the organism called the earth unless we feel and care for other organisms as we do for ourselves—and unless we take action.

Soon after I left the Canton I read, in an otherwise unsuccint paper on ecology: "Organisms themselves are relatively transient entities through which materials and energy flow and eventually return to the environment." In my more skittish moments I am currently inclined to think that I would rather like this sentence as my epitaph.