Quotes About Nature

If there is something that appears to lie beyond the natural world as it is now imperfectly understood, we hope eventually to understand it and embrace it within the natural. As ever when we unweave a rainbow, it will not become less wonderful.

No matter how much knowledge and wisdom you acquire during your life, not one jot will be passed on to your children by genetic means. Each new generation starts from scratch. A body is the genes' way of preserving the genes unaltered.

Nature is a miserly accountant, grudging the pennies, watching the clock, punishing the smallest extravagance.

Staving off death is a thing that you have to work at. Left to itself -? ?and that is what it is when it dies? ?- the body tends to revert to a state of? equilibrium with its environment.

We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism—something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.*

Scientific truths are true even if there's nobody around to know about them; were true before humans appeared; will be true after we are extinct.

There exists no objective basis on which to elevate one species above another.

An itinerant selfish gene Said 'Bodies a plenty I've seen. You think you're so clever But I'll live for ever. You're just a survival machine.

Smolin's idea, expounded in The Life of the Cosmos, hinges

But the very fact that Darwinism is true makes it even more important for us to fight against the naturally selfish and exploitative tendencies of nature.We can do it.Probably no other species of animal or plant can. We can do it because our brains (admittedly given to us by natural selection for reasons pf short-term Darwinian gain) are big enough to see into the future and plot long-term consequences.

A male on the other hand can never get enough copulations with as many different females as possible: the word excess has no meaning for a male.

Our genes may instruct us to be selfish, but we are not necessarily compelled to obey them all our lives. It may just be more difficult to learn altruism than it would be if we were genetically programmed to be altruistic. Among animals, man is uniquely dominated by culture, by influences learned and handed down.

Fig trees and fig wasps share an intimate cooperative relationship. The fig that you eat is not really a fruit. There is a tiny hole at the end, and if you go into this hole (you'd have to be as small as a fig wasp to do so, and they are minute: thankfully too small to notice when you eat a fig), you find hundreds of tiny flowers lining the walls. The fig is a dark indoor hothouse for flowers, an indoor pollination chamber. And the only agents that can do the pollinating are fig wasps.

bizarre example of what appears to be a Tit for Tat arrangement in nature was discovered by Eric Fischer in a hermaphrodite fish, the sea bass.

A quasi-mystical response to nature and the universe is common among scientists and rationalists. It has no connection with supernatural belief.

A passive replicator is a replicator whose nature has no influence over its probability of being copied.

Adoption and contraception, like reading, mathematics, and stress-induced illness, are products of an animal that is living in an environment radically different from the one in which its genes were naturally selected.

Debemos enseñar a nuestros hijos el altruismo ya que no podemos esperar que éste forme parte de su naturaleza biológica

Should we then not expect lions to refrain from killing antelopes, 'for the good of the mammals'? Surely they should hunt birds or reptiles instead

Living bodies are machines programmed by genes that have survived.

Why did sex, that bizarre perversion of straightforward replication, ever arise in the first place? What is the good of sex?* This is an extremely difficult question for the evolutionist to answer.

The 'expert' on the programme observed that the vast majority of baby spiders end up as prey for other species, and she then went on to say: 'Perhaps this is the real purpose of their existence, as only a few need to survive in order for the species to be preserved'!

Unless otherwise stated, 'altruistic behaviour' and 'selfish behaviour' will mean behaviour directed by one animal body toward another.

Unweaving the Rainbow