Quotes About Biology

Indeed, Walcott's discovery turned Darwin's anticipated bottom-up—or small changes first, big changes later—pattern on its head.

The relative suddenness of the Cambrian explosion, even on the earlier measure of its duration, had already raised serious questions about the adequacy of the neo-Darwinian mechanism; consequently, it had also raised questions about whether a Darwinian understanding of the history of life could be reconciled with the Cambrian and Precambrian fossil record.

that there are no biological forms left to discover. He means, rather, that we have good reason to conclude that such discoveries will not alter the largely discontinuous pattern that has emerged.

with the Darwinian view for yet another reason. The Chengjiang discoveries intensify the top-down pattern of appearance

with the Darwinian view for yet another reason. The Chengjiang discoveries intensify the top-down pattern of appearance in which individual representatives of the higher taxonomic categories (phyla, subphyla, and classes) appear and only later diversify into the lower taxonomic categories (families, genera, and species).

There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings, and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows."19

natural selection explains "only the survival of the fittest, not the arrival of the fittest.

All this suggested to me that there are important distinctions to be made when talking about information in DNA. In the first place, it's important to distinguish information defined as "a piece of knowledge known by a person" from information defined as "a sequence of characters or arrangements of something that produce a specific effect." Whereas the first of these two definitions of information doesn't apply to DNA, the

the kind of information that DNA contains, namely, functionally specified information.

How does the sequence of bases on the DNA direct the construction of protein molecules?

Darwin's Origin explained many classes of biological evidence with just two central organizing ideas. The twin pillars of his theory were the ideas of universal common ancestry and natural selection.

As Darwin described it, the ability of natural selection to produce significant biological change depends upon the presence of three distinct elements: (1) randomly arising variations, (2) the heritability of those variations, and (3) a competition for survival, resulting in differences in reproductive success among competing organisms.

As Chen explained, the Chinese fossils turn Darwin's tree of life "upside down.

The term "Cambrian explosion" was to become common coin, because Walcott's site suggested the geologically abrupt appearance of a menagerie of animals as various as any found in the gaudiest science fiction. During this explosion of fauna, representatives of about twenty of the roughly twenty-seven total phyla present in the known fossil record made their first appearance on earth (see Fig. 2.5).

host of distinguished biologists have explained in recent technical papers, small-scale, or "microevolutionary," change cannot be extrapolated to explain large-scale, or "macroevolutionary," innovation

requires the creation of entirely new information. As an increasing number of evolutionary biologists have noted, natural selection explains "only the survival of the fittest, not the arrival of the fittest.

Oxford biologists Alan Cooper and Richard Fortey depict the Ediacaran fauna as lying on a line of descent separate from the Cambrian animals rather than being ancestral to them.23

This absence of clear affinities has led an increasing number of paleontologists to reject ancestor-descendant relationships between all but (at most) a few of the Ediacaran and Cambrian fauna.

According to Darwinian theory, differences in biological form should increase gradually, steadily increasing the number of distinct body plans and phyla, over time. References for first appearances are found in note 5 of this chapter.

A PUZZLING PATTERN Over the years, as paleontologists have reflected on the overall pattern of the Precambrian–Cambrian fossil record in light of Walcott's discoveries, they too have noted several features of the Cambrian explosion that are unexpected from a Darwinian point of view11 in particular: (1) the sudden appearance of Cambrian animal forms; (2)

Despite the scope of his synthesis, there was one set of facts that troubled Darwin—something he conceded his theory couldn't adequately explain, at least at present. Darwin was puzzled by a pattern in the fossil record that seemed to document the geologically sudden appearance of animal life in a remote period of geologic history, a period that at first was commonly called the Silurian, but later came to be known as the Cambrian.

Earlier, in 1954, biochemist George Wald argued for the causal efficacy of chance in conjunction with vast expanses of time. As he explained, "Time is in fact the hero of the plot…. Given so much time, the impossible becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain."2

But weren't we also talking about the white pines? What do they get out of it? This is how the white pines propagate. It is a form of pollination, or rather an innovation on pollination as we usually define it.

By locating our consciousness in only one biological oscillator, the brain, we blinded ourselves to perceptions that have been common to human beings since they emerged from this Earth. In gaining a reductionist understanding of the world, we lost touch with the essential nature of the Earth and ourselves.