Quotes About Organisms

Organisms themselves are relatively transient entities through which materials and energy flow and eventually return to the environment.

They may not become extinct immediately, but being pushed out of decaying or destroyed habitats eventually takes its toll. The concept is known as extinction debt, the delay between the stress on species and the final dwindling of the last survivors until the organisms disappear and are never seen again.

How can there be any secrets, we are all the same organisms? How can there be any secrecy, when everything is known to all of us?

Just like mutations to DNA in biological organisms allow for evolution through natural selection, forking lets us run multiple experiments in parallel where the strongest versions survive.

In humans, smell is often viewed as an aesthetic sense, as a sense capable of eliciting enduring thoughts and memories. Smell, however, is the primal sense. It is the sense that affords most organisms the ability to detect food, predators, and mates.

The long-term impacts of GMOs are unknown, and once released into the environment, these novel organisms cannot be recalled.

We must change our philosophy, abandon our attitude of human superiority and admit that in many cases in natural environments we find ways and means of limiting populations of organisms in a more economical way than we can do it ourselves

Dorian Purcell, focused intensely on archaea, the third domain of animal life. The first domain is eukaryotes, which includes human beings and all other higher organisms. The second domain is bacteria. Microscopic archaea, which lack a nucleus, were long thought to be a kind of bacteria. But they have unique properties, not least of which is the ability to effectuate horizontal gene transfer.

Although he has perhaps breathed in hundreds of billions—even trillions—of programmed archaea that are carrying longevity-fostering genes from many species, perhaps it is a mistake to regard the breach of the organism-isolation labs as an existential crisis.

We live in a dancing matrix of viruses; they dart, rather like bees, from organism to organism, from plant to insect to mammal to me and back again, and into the sea, tugging along pieces of this genome, strings of genes from that, transplanting grafts of DNA, passing around heredity as though at a great party.

Here at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, we have genetically rearranged various viruses and bacteria as part of our medical research. In fact, we have been able to create entirely new types of DNA molecules by splicing together the genetic information from different organisms - recombinant DNA.

The general struggle for existence of animate beings is not a struggle for raw materials – these, for organisms, are air, water and soil, all abundantly available – nor for energy which exists in plenty in any body in the form of heat, but a struggle for [negative] entropy, which becomes available through the transition of energy from the hot sun to the cold earth.

In biology especially, we have labels for everything—molecules, anatomical parts, physiological functions, organisms, ideas, hypotheses. The nominal fallacy is the error of believing that the label carries explanatory information.

Despite its claim to a new view among the psychological sciences, affective neuroscience is deeply rooted within physiological psychology, behavioral biology, and the modernized label for all of these disciplines: behavioral neuroscience. The present coverage will rely heavily on data collected by individuals in these fields, but it will put a new twist on the evidence. It reinterprets many of the brain-behavior findings to try to account for the central neuropsychic states of organisms.

All living beings, not just animals, but plants and microorganisms, perceive. To survive, an organic being must perceive - it must seek, or at least recognize, food and avoid environmental danger.

the germ theory said that minute living organisms invaded the body, multiplied, and caused disease, and that a specific germ caused a specific disease.

But if viruses perform only one task, they are not simple. Nor are they primitive. Highly evolved, elegant in their focus, more efficient at what they do than any fully living being, they have become nearly perfect infectious organisms. And the influenza virus is among the most perfect of these perfect organisms.

Individual organisms are best thought of as adaptation-executers rather than as fitness-maximizers.

All living beings, not just animals, but plants and microorganisms, perceive. To survive, an organic being must perceive - it must seek, or at least recognize, food and avoid environmental danger.

IN HIS BOOK THE FUTURE OF LIFE, E.O. Wilson sets the scene with an image that highlights the complex fragility of "Spaceship Earth": "The totality of life, known as the biosphere to scientists and creation to the theologians, is a membrane of organisms wrapped around Earth so thin it cannot be seen edgewise from a space shuttle, yet so internally complex that most species composing it remain undiscovered.

In nature's cyclical rhythms, there are no ground for the discriminatory view that underlies Darwin's view of superiority and inferiority that deems some organisms as lower, and others as higher. It would be more appropriate to say we are all one continuous life-form.

isoantigens—antigens within the same species.

What she means is that cities exchange not only species, but also the human inventions that make those cities tick and that urban organisms must adapt to.

The amazing but in retrospect unsurprising fact established by the diligent work of many investigators in laboratory evolution over decades is that the great majority of even beneficial positively selected mutations damage an organism's genetic information—either degrading or outright destroying functional coded elements.