Quotes About Biology

Trees are contrivances for lofting bacteria skyward to give them a clear view of a yellow dwarf.

One gram of rich forest soil contains an estimated 100 million prokaryotes.

One begins to wonder if all the most interesting problems in physics are now in biology.

Nothing is more conservative than a bacterium.

Radical feminists and evolutionists agree that males are a serious cost to society.

Your 40 trillion cells contain at least a quadrillion mitochondria, with a combined convoluted surface area of about 14,000 square metres; about four football fields.

It seems that all eukaryotic cells either have, or once had (and then lost) mitochondria. In other words, possession of mitochondria is a sine qua non of the eukaryotic condition

To doubt that life evolved, even if some of the details described in this book may yet prove wrong, is to doubt the convergence of evidence, from molecules to men, from bacteria to planetary systems. It is to doubt the evidence of biology, and its concordance with physics and chemistry, geology and astronomy. It is to doubt the veracity of experiment and observation, to doubt the testing in reality. It is, in the end, to doubt reality.

All life on our planet is related, and the readout of letters in DNA shows exactly how. By comparing DNA sequences, we can compute statistically how closely related we are to anything, from monkeys to marsupials, to reptiles, amphibians, fish, insects, crustaceans, worms, plants, protozoa, bacteria–you name it.

Cambrian period, some 550 million years ago, soon after a big global rise in atmospheric oxygen.

He was just a boy. She was just a girl. It was biologically determined that things would be complicated.

By means of the notion of "cultural evolution," the democratic anthropologist tries to avoid questions of biology.

If I could have been a marine biologist I would have, but I didn't have that kind of intelligence. Numbers were never my strong point.

Research employing fractal rules has revealed a three-quarter power law even in the circulatory system.

You learn about fight or flight, but no one ever mentions the third alliterative option - freeze.

Cybernetics takes the view that the structure of the machines or of the organism is an index of the performance that may be expected from it.

Belief becomes biology.

Not only does the brain send signals to the body to influence it; the body sends signals to the brain to affect it as well, and thus there is constant, two-way communication between them. The body abounds with neurons, the gut alone having 100 million. Only in anatomy textbooks is the brain isolated from the body and confined to the head.

dead skin and is moist, so it is a great conductor. And it has so many nerves that Paul thought it would deliver a high-resolution image to the

A very long time ago, some 2.5 million years B.C., the mother of human species as we know it, our ultimate ancestor, appeared in East Africa... She was four feet tall and probably black..

natural selection may be able to explain the survival of a species, but it cannot explain the arrival of a species.

molecules composing the human anatomy correspond to, and are in sympathetic relationship with those in the food we

My relative examined you, observed a few of your normal body cells, compared them with what it had learned from other humans most like you, and said that you had not only a cancer, but a talent for cancer.

There seem to be solid biological reasons why we are the way we are. If there weren't, the cycles wouldn't keep replaying. The human species is a kind of animal, of course. But we can do something no other animal species has ever had the option to do. We can choose: We can go on building and destroying until we either destroy ourselves or destroy the ability of our world to sustain us. Or we can make