Quotes About Biology

In the dissection of the muscles, attention should be directed to the exact origin, insertion, and actions of each, and to its more important relations with surrounding parts.

Survival, in the cool economics of biology, means simply the persistence of one's own genes in the generations to follow.

When most of us hear the phrase, 'survival of the fittest,' we assume it originated with Charles Darwin. It did not. The phrase doesn't exist anywhere in Darwin's first edition of 'Origin of the Species.'

While the hippocampus itself doesn't store memories, it serves to triage our experiences based upon their survival significance.

Since the majority of the oxygen we breathe comes from the ocean, not to mention much of the world's protein, it is not an exaggeration to say that when our oceans' health declines, our very survival is at risk.

It is the cells which create and maintain in us, during the span of our lives, our will to live and survive, to search and experiment, and to struggle.

You live in intimate association with bacteria, and you couldn't survive without them.

Our aggression is a deep instinct which survives in all kinds of manifestations in modern man.

Sharks are among the most perfectly constructed creatures in nature. Some forms have survived for two hundred million years.

I have removed the spleen from a dog, from cats, and rabbits. In all cases, the animals survived the operation and did not appear to be in the least affected by the absence of the organ.

I haven't checked, but I highly suspect that chickens evolved from an egg-laying ancestor, which would mean that there were, in fact, eggs before there were chickens. Genius.

I suspect that a substantial fraction of human problems in the world today, not just cults, result from the mismatch between the current environment and the environment in which we evolved.

If you look in the animal world, many, many organisms will enter into states of suspended animation.

In the immortal germ line of human beings - that is, the eggs that sit in the ovaries - they actually sit there in a state of suspended animation for up to 50 years in the life of each woman.

We found evolution will punish you if you're selfish and mean. For a short time and against a specific set of opponents, some selfish organisms may come out ahead. But selfishness isn't evolutionarily sustainable.

My mother says ladies perspire and men sweat. Clearly, I am more of a man.

A lot of things came out of my interest in marine biology, like the fact that there are scallops that fly in the air, and in SpongeBob's world, scallops swim the same way in the ocean.

The ocean is the source of life. We all come from there. I think about these one-celled creatures, and I think about the planet. It is related to my obsession with biology, even if it's only a layperson's obsession. The way I visualise what's at the bottom of the ocean is very much to do with how I feel when I'm swimming in the sea.

The human body is not designed for swimming in minus 1.7 degree centigrade water.

There can be little doubt that fishes swimming rapidly do not make respiratory movements at all, but obtain the necessary ventilation of the gills simply by opening the mouth.

You don't just magically flip some evolutionary switch somewhere and transmute a quadruped into an upright-walking bipedal human.

I didn't want to go to school for more than four years, and I didn't know what you did with a bachelor's in biology. So I switched over and got my degree in communications. I regret it now. It was one of the most idiotic things I ever did.

Guinea pigs are practically synonymous with experiments. Lab rats have become the workhorses of modern medicine. Genetics owes a huge debt to the humble fruit fly. There's almost no branch of the life sciences, in fact, that hasn't leaned heavily on one animal or another.

I like to think of synthetic biology as liquid alchemy, only instead of transmuting precious metals, you're synthesizing new biological functionality inside very small channels. It's called microfluidics.