Quotes About Organisms

The ability to generate images opened the way for organisms to represent the world around them, a world that included every possible kind of object and other whole organisms; and, just as important, it allowed organisms to represent the world inside each of them. Before the emergence of mapping and images and minds, organisms could acknowledge the presence of other organisms and of external objects and respond accordingly.

The sensing and responding level of perception precedes minds, historically speaking, and is also present in minded organisms now.

Life would not be viable without the traits imposed by homeostasis, and we know that homeostasis has existed ever since life began. But feelings—the subjective experiences of the momentary state of homeostasis within a living body—did not emerge when life did. I propose that they emerged only after organisms were endowed with nervous systems, a far more recent development that began to occur only about 600 million years ago.

Les organismes sont continuellement en train de changer, passant par une série "d'états": chacun de ces derniers correspond une configuration dans laquelle les diverses composantes de l'organisme présentent un niveau d'activité donnée.

I have a big following among the biogeeks of this world. Nobody ever puts them in books.

Organisms do not passively receive information from their environments, which they then translate into internal representations. Natural cognitive systems...participate in the generation of meaning ...engaging in transformational and not merely informational interactions: they enact a world.

I have always thought of all creatures-all organisms, really-as relations. Whether wandering alone in deep wilderness or just leaning against a tree growing beside an urban sidewalk, I have had no difficulty feeling, as if in dreamtime, the roots of our relatedness-ecologically, yes, but also with an overlay of the sacred, the holy.

Okay, back to business. Billy grins, leaning back against the cushions. Give me two more characteristics of living things. I'll give you a hint: you left out the most fun one. Fun one? Im picturing the textbook, responsiveness, growth, complex organizations, metabolism, responsiveness... Oh! I hit Billy. You are such a perv! Who me? What are you talking about? The most fun one? Reproduction? Hey, even microorganisms gotta have fun, right?

Life is the mode of action of proteins.

we are chemosensory idiots. By comparison most other organisms are geniuses.

At the deepest level, all living things that have ever been looked at have the same DNA code. And many of the same genes.

The view of living systems as networks provides a helpful new perspective on the so-called hierarchies of nature. For example, we can picture an ecosystem schematically as a network with a few nodes. Each node represents an organism, which means that each node, when magnified, appears itself as a network. Each node in the new network may represent an organ, which in turn will appear as a network when magnified, and so on.In other words, the web of life consists of networks within networks.

In any case, however many subatomic particles there may be, organisms are wholes, and reducing them to their parts by killing them and analysing their chemical constituents simply destroys what makes them organisms.

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.

Only wealthy organisms are able to culturally diversify, and as human beings get richer and richer, our instinct is to get ever more weird. As productivity has skyrocketed, so has our ability to do what we'd like instead of merely focusing on survival.

Continuity of life means continual readaptation of the environment to the needs of living organisms.

In living organisms, nucleic acid molecules are the only indefinite hereditary replicators, or at least they were until the invention of language and music.

In Penthesilea's equatorial heart, all sorts of unpleasant things grew in unaired shoes.

WHY is ocean acidification so dangerous? The question is tough to answer only because the list of reasons is so long. Depending on how tightly organisms are able to regulate their internal chemistry, acidification may affect such basic processes as metabolism, enzyme activity, and protein function. Because it will

background extinction." In ordinary times—times here understood to mean whole geologic epochs—extinction takes place only very rarely, more rarely even than speciation, and it occurs at what's known as the background extinction rate. This rate varies from one group of organisms to another; often it's expressed in terms of extinctions per million species-years.

Warming today is taking place at least ten times faster than it did at the end of the last glaciation, and at the end of all those glaciations that preceded it. To keep up, organisms will have to migrate, or otherwise adapt, at least ten times more quickly.

Later, as his [Cuvier's] list of extinct species grew, his position changed. There had, he decided, been multiple cataclysms. "Life on earth has often been disturbed by terrible events," he wrote. "Living organisms without number have been victims of these catastrophes.

In Cuvier's day, the most prominent proponent of transformisme was his senior colleague at the Museum of Natural History, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. According to Lamarck, there was a force—the "power of life"—that pushed organisms to become increasingly complex.

Life on the planet is being homogenized by the expanding human population and the frequent and rapid movement of people and goods, which carry invasive organisms with them. These invasives often flourish in their new ecosystems because, like the woolly adelgid, they have escaped their predators.