Quotes About Organisms

It is these phenotypic effects that we see as adaptations to survival. When we ask whose survival they are adapted to ensure, the fundamental answer has to be not the group, nor the individual organism, but the relevant replicators themselves.

Living bodies are machines programmed by genes that have survived.

Natural selection is the process whereby replicators out-propagate each other. They do this by exerting phenotypic effects on the world, and it is often convenient to see those phenotypic effects as grouped together in discrete 'vehicles' such as individual organisms. This gives substance to the orthodox doctrine that each individual body can be thought of as a unitary agent maximizing one quantity—'fitness'

the conclusion I wish to draw is not really disputable. If host behaviour or physiology is a parasite adaptation, there must be (have been) parasite genes 'for' modifying the host, and the host modifications are therefore part of the phenotypic expression of those parasite genes. The extended phenotype reaches out of the body in whose cells the genes lie, reaches out to the living tissues of other organisms.

Whatever the claims of memes to be regarded as replicators in the same sense as genes, the first part of this chapter established that individual organisms are not replicators.

Nature favors those organisms which leave the environment in better shape for their progeny to survive.

New religionists, such as Williams, Dawkins, and Wilson, regard people and all other organisms as the helpless puppets, tools, or vehicles, of hidden purposive agents of more than human power and intelligence, whose only goal is to produce the largest possible number of their replicas in the next generation of organisms. But

Living organisms are constructed, for the most part, from compounds of carbon and hydrogen. Carbon is critical because of its astonishing flexibility. Add hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur and we can account for 99 percent of the dry weight of all living organisms.

Quantum theory is, as I have said, one such theory. But the other three main strands of explanation through which we seek to understand the fabric of reality are all 'high level' from the point of view of quantum physics. They are the theory of evolution (primarily the evolution of living organisms), epistemology (the theory of knowledge) and the theory of computation (about computers and what they can and cannot, in principle, compute).

while humans transform inhospitable environments like the biosphere into support systems for themselves. And, while every other organism is a factory for converting resources of a fixed type into more such organisms, human bodies (including their brains) are factories for transforming anything into anything that the laws of nature allow. They are 'universal constructors'.

Remixing Our Metaphors We're not a cancer or a disease. We are organisms doing what all organisms do, surviving and reproducing as best we can. We are, however, a kind of organism that has never existed before, and we've gotten ourselves in a situation. Fortunately, we may be equipped to get ourselves out of it. A plague does not think. A cancer does not decide to change course. A weed does not weed itself. We could.

The degree of cooperation between organisms can be expected to be a direct function of the proportion of the genes they share; conversely, the degree of conflict between them is an inverse function of the proportion of shared genes.

The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not television, or radio, but rather the complexity of the land organism.

A tissue is evidently an enduring thing. It's functional and structural conditions become modified from moment to moment. Time is really the fourth dimension of living organisms. It enters as part into the constitution of a tissue. Cell colonies, or organs, are events which progressively unfold themselves. They must be studied like history.

In environments that are energy-rich but liquid-poor, like near the surface of Titan, natural selection may favor organisms that use their metabolic heat to melt their own watering holes.

Injecting CO2 into an underground reservoir would certainly change the local environment and thus affect the organisms that live there. Some will thrive, and others will suffer. While we should minimize such impacts, they cannot be avoided completely. The same happens when one plows a field, builds a house or a road, or waters a lawn.

The world depends on fungi, because they are major players in the cycling of materials and energy around the world.

People are not the only interesting organism on earth. From the point of view of scientific or commercial value, there are lots of interesting organisms.

Excess nitrogen from the fertilizers can cause eutrophication in the ocean, which can lead to harmful algae blooms or hypoxia - reduced levels of oxygen that create conditions in which organisms can't survive.

Let's talk of a system that transforms all the social organisms into a work of art, in which the entire process of work is included... something in which the principle of production and consumption takes on a form of quality. It's a Gigantic project.

There is an effective strategy open to architects. Whereas doctors deal with the interior organisms of man, architects deal with the exterior organisms of man. Architects might join with one another to carry on their work in laboratories as do doctors in anticipatory medicine.

For the first half of geological time our ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria, and each one of our trillions of cells is a colony of bacteria.

Lichens are small organisms that often grow on bark and on rocks. A lichen (sounds like "liken") is a fungus growing in association with a species of alga or cyanobacterium, forming a single combined organism.

Consciousness is the chronic pain of life, and all higher organisms suffer it every waking moment.