Quotes About Biology

If the history-deniers who doubt the fact of evolution are ignorant of biology, those who think the world began less than ten thousand years ago are worse than ignorant, they are deluded to the point of perversity. They are denying not only the facts of biology but those of physics, geology, cosmology, archaeology, history and chemistry as well.

We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.

The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity.

If there is a human moral to be drawn, it is that we must teach our children altruism, for we cannot expect it to be part of their biological nature.

Even if not a single fossil has ever been found, the evidence from surviving animals would still overwhelmingly force the conclusion that Darwin was right.

I am an enthusiastic Darwinian, but I think Darwinism is too big a theory to be confined to the narrow context of the gene.

there are no natural borderlines in evolution. The illusion of a borderline is created by the fact that the evolutionary intermediates happen to be extinct.

Relatives share a substantial proportion of their genes. Each selfish gene therefore has its loyalties divided between different bodies.

Natural selection is a beguiling counterfeiter of deliberate purpose.

As J. B. S. Haldane said when asked what evidence might contradict evolution, 'Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian.

The genes are master programmers, and they are programming for their lives.

A deep understanding of Darwinism teaches us to be wary of the easy assumption that design is the only alternative to chance

Of course they don't function as gills, but five-week human embryos can be regarded as little pink fishes, with gills.

Watson retorted: 'Well I don't think we're for anything. We're just products of evolution. You can say, Gee, your life must be pretty bleak if you don't think there's a purpose. But I'm anticipating having a good lunch.' We did have a good lunch, too.

I speculate that we shall come to accept the more radical idea that each one of our genes is a symbiotic unit. We are gigantic colonies of symbiotic genes.

In the case of living machinery, the 'designer' is unconscious natural selection, the blind watchmaker.

Your family tree includes not just obvious cousins like chimpanzees and monkeys but also mice, buffaloes, iguanas, wallabies, snails, dandelions, golden eagles, mushrooms, whales, wombats and bacteria. All are our cousins. Every last one of them. Isn't that a far more wonderful thought than any myth?

With only a little imagination we can see the gene as sitting at the centre of a radiating web of extended phenotypic power.

Putting these three things together we arrive at our own 'central theorem' of the extended phenotype: An animal's behaviour tends to maximize the survival of the genes 'for' that behaviour, whether or not those genes happen to be in the body of the particular animal performing it.

if a design is good enough to evolve once, the same design principle is good enough to evolve twice, from different starting points, in different parts of the animal kingdom.

Should we then not expect lions to refrain from killing antelopes, 'for the good of the mammals'?

Oricât de mult am vrea s? credem altcumva, iubirea universal? ÅŸi bun?starea tuturor speciilor laolalt? sunt, din punct de vedere evoluÅ£ionist, concepte f?r? sens.

The physicist's problem is the problem of ultimate origins and ultimate natural laws. The biologist's problem is the problem of complexity.

however many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead, or rather not alive. You may throw cells together at random, over and over again for a billion years, and not once will you get a conglomeration that flies or swims or burrows or runs, or does anything, even badly, that could remotely be construed as working to keep itself alive.