Quotes About Organisms

Disease is not the prerogative of man and the domestic animals, so it was quite natural to see if the lower animals, with very simple organizations, showed pathological phenomena, and if so, infection, cure and immunity could be observed among them.

You are not what you think you are. Instead of the form staring back at you when you look in the mirror, what you should imagine is your body as a collection of multiple dynamic ecosystems made up of very tiny, and very biologically diverse, organisms.

An attempt to study the evolution of living organisms without reference to cytology would be as futile as an account of stellar evolution which ignored spectroscopy.

There is nothing that living things do that cannot be understood from the point of view that they are made of atoms acting according to the laws of physics.

If a healthy soil is full of death, it is also full of life: worms, fungi, microorganisms of all kinds ... Given only the health of the soil, nothing that dies is dead for very long.

Well, all life forms are dependent upon water.

The problem that we, as living organisms, face - and not we only, humans, but any living organism faces - is the management of life.

The position I took at the time was that we hadn't really examined any of the potential environmental consequences of introducing genetically modified organisms.

Most who face this dilemma will not end up dwelling in vehicles. Those who do are analogous to what biologists call an "indicator species"—sensitive organisms with the capacity to signal much larger shifts in an ecosystem.

Nature seems to have built into organisms an innate healthy-mindedness; it expresses itself in self-delight, in the pleasure of unfolding one's capacities into the world, in the incorporation of things in that world, and in feeding on its limitless experiences.

I could walk into a wooded area and pinpoint within a foot any body he'd left there. I noticed this because my area of expertise was modeling how different systems stake out and create their own ecosystems. I use the term system because sometimes it's a confluence of organisms working together—in their own interests—yet yielding a mutual benefit. The shape of a thing isn't always the thing.

That the human body or any other animal is a system comprised of millions of smaller systems, some of them completely separate from us genetically, shouldn't be an earthshaking revelation.

DNA is the master blueprint for life and constitutes the genetic material in all free-living organisms and most viruses. RNA is the genetic material of certain viruses, but it is also found in all living cells, where it plays an important role in certain processes such as the making of proteins.

Owing to the difficulty of dealing with substances of high molecular weight we are still a long way from having determined the chemical characteristics and the constitution of proteins, which are regarded as the principal con-stituents of living organisms.

NASA, and all the other spacefaring nations of the world, have agreed to a set of 'planetary-protection' principles, aimed at preventing the accidental contamination of another habitable world with organisms from Earth.

Capitalism proceeds through creative destruction. What is created is capitalism in a 'new and improved' form - and what is destroyed is self-sustaining capacity, livelihood and dignity of its innumerable and multiplied 'host organisms' into which all of us are drawn/seduced one way or another.

Titan has no liquid water on its surface, and any liquid water beneath its surface is inaccessible to us, as far as we know. It has hydrocarbon lakes, but we don't know of any organisms that could live in those, not at the temperatures that we find on Titan. Any reference to possible life in lakes on the surface of Titan is pure speculation.

neurotransmitters, a paramecium

First, Darwinian theory tells us how a certain amount of diversity in life forms can develop once we have various types of complex living organisms already in existence.

All life pulsates in time to the Earth and our artificial fields cause abnormal reactions in all organisms... Increasing electropollution could set in motion irreversible changes leading to our extinction.

Think of it: zillions and zillions of organisms running around, each under the hypnotic spell of a single truth, all these truths identical, and all logically incompatible with one another : 'My hereditary material is the most important material on earth; its survival justifies your frustration, pain, even death'. And you are one of those organisms, living your life in the thrall of a logical absurdity.

We are not blank slates, as some behaviorists once imagined. We are organisms whose more egregious tendencies can be greatly, if arduously, subdued. And a primary reason for this tenuous optimism is the abject flexibility with which status is sought. We will do almost anything for respect, including not act like animals.

Sometime in the first billion years, life appeared on the earth's surface. Slowly, the fossil record indicates, living organisms climbed the ladder from simple to more advanced forms.

Human beings have one of the poorest senses of smell of all the organisms on Earth, so weak that we have only a tiny vocabulary to express it...We depend on the sophistication of trained dogs to lead us through the olfactory world, tracking individual people, detecting even the slightest trace of explosives and other dangerous chemicals.