Quotes About Biology

We need to take a leaf out of nature's book. Any species that clones itself will eventually be attacked by a parasite, leading to an inevitable population crash.

Species go extinct because there are historical contraints built into a given body or a given design.

If you're a gazelle, you don't have a very complex emotional life, despite being a social species. But primates are just smart enough that they can think their bodies into working differently. It's not until you get to primates that you get things that look like depression.

Closely related species of birds are also chromosomally similar.

We observe closely related species in sympatry and infer how they evolved from a common ancestor.

I think that my main criticism in that book was directed at the general assumption that adaptation characterizes populations and species, rather than simply the individuals in the populations and species.

Why is it not just as likely that there were as many small general nearly at first as now, and as great a disproportion in the number of their species?

Where do we say that a cell became a blade of grass, which became a starfish, which became a cat, which became a donkey, which became a human being? There's a real lack of evidence from change from actual species to a different type of species.

The way to understand how different species evolved is to think about the niches that they fill in an ecosystem - basically, how they make a living.

I have heard endlessly that fish are so resilient that there is no way that you could exterminate a species. We are learning otherwise.

I think, to a great degree, we humans still divide ourselves into two species, even though we are monotypic. There are males and females. We see them as different and not equal.

I remember my first lecture on my first day in evolutionary biology, how populations and species change. I sat thinking, 'Why doesn't everyone know this?' I look back on it almost in horror: I came so close to not knowing how exciting our world is.

Clearly, we are a species that is well connected to other species. Whether or not we evolve from them, we are certainly very closely related to them. A series of mutations could change us into all kinds of intermediate species. Whether or not those intermediate species are provably in the past, they could easily be in our future.

The story of Noah is self-contradictory, uncorroborated by independent historical evidence, and is generally at odds with everything we know about our planet's geology, biology, and species diversity.

RNase H is a specific RNase that will cleave the RNA of a DNA/RNA duplex.

To me, body and mind are different aspects of specific biological processes.

IndieBio's capital, facilities and deep mentoring by a network of biotech specific experts have the potential to spawn the Google's, Facebook's and Instagram's of biology.

I decided that I wanted to become an engineer of the biological world, specifically a protein engineer.

We haven't yet found a speck of evidence for biology on another world, so we have no objective way to judge whether life is a onetime fluke or a near-inevitable phenomenon.

Evolution is a bankrupt speculative philosophy, not a scientific fact.

As the planet warms, evolution speeds. We've known this for a long time.

Although each egg cell produced by a woman carries a single X chromosome, the sperm cells produced by a man carry either an X or a Y. This means, in very simple terms, that the sperm cell determines a baby's sex.

Man comes not from an egg but from an animalcule that is found in male sperm.

Relativity must replace absolutism in the realm of morals as well as in the spheres of physics and biology.