Quotes About Biology

When it comes to brains, size matters. It's not all that matters, of course. Whales and dolphins have brains that are larger than humans', but few of the flippered and fluked set win tenure at Stanford. Our brains are the largest in proportion to body size, and they're also highly sophisticated.

There's a misconception that survival of the fittest means survival of the most aggressive. The adjective 'Darwinian' used to refer to ruthless competition; you used to read that in business journals. But that's not what Darwinian means to a biologist; it's whatever leads to reproductive success.

If any person examines by the microscope that part towards the extremity of the spider's body from whence its thread proceeds, he will observe the spot to be, as it were, surrounded by five several protuberances or risings, each ending in a point and altogether forming a kind of enclosure.

No matter how closely you examine the water, glucose, and electrolyte salts in the human brain, you can't find the point where these molecules became conscious.

There's a long tradition in Western thought that humans are not shackled by biology, whereas animals are pure instinct machines.

The very large brain that humans have, plus the things that go along with it - language, art, science - seemed to have evolved only once. The eye, by contrast, independently evolved 40 times. So, if you were to 'replay' evolution, the eye would almost certainly appear again, whereas the big brain probably wouldn't.

The language of chemistry simply does not mesh with that of biology. Chemistry is about substances and how they react, whereas biology appeals to concepts such as information and organisation. Informational narratives permeate biology.

Whereas in the past people have seen the two sexes as almost incomprehensibly different, now there is a group of people that are explaining the connections between both the genders, literally in the way their biology informs some of their expression.

Wherever there is a design that is highly successful in a broad range of similar environments, it is apt to emerge again and again, independently - the phenomenon known in biology as convergent evolution. I call these designs 'good tricks.'

Physiology seeks to derive the processes in our own nervous system from general physical forces, without considering whether these processes are or are not accompanied by processes of consciousness.

I believe that all centers that appear in space - whether they originate in biology, in physical forces, in pure geometry, in color - are alike simply in that they all animate space. It is this animated space that has its functional effect upon the world, that determines the way things work, that governs the presence of harmony and life.

I would say that molecular gastronomy is a field of science. I would - I would say that it's probably lumped under chemistry, maybe. Because cooking, while it has certainly biology and some physics, it's mostly chemistry.

The eyeball is contained in the cavity of the orbit. In this situation, it is securely protected from injury, whilst its position is such as to ensure the most extensive range of sight.

When I started in the field, aging research was the backwater of biology. The idea that you could find a molecule that would prevent many diseases at once was considered impossible.

What I am primarily is a neurogeneticist: I use genetics to study problems in neurobiology. The one problem I study primarily... understanding of the sense of touch.

What attracted me to immunology was that the whole thing seemed to revolve around a very simple experiment: take two different antibody molecules and compare their primary sequences.

The manner in which life constructs itself must be dealing with some other principle which we've failed to identify.

It was a shock to people of the nineteenth century when they discovered, from observations science had made, that many features of the biological world could be ascribed to the elegant principle of natural selection.

Once the principle is there, that cells have the same genes, my own personal belief is that we will, in the end, understand everything about how cells actually work.

Darwin investigated the numerous facts obtained by naturalists in living nature and analysed them through the prism of practical experience.

There is indeed the possibility that the evolutionary process has, in gray antiquity, bred into us an excess of aggression.

Our increasing ability to alter our biology and open up the processes of life is now fueling a new cultural war.

Medicine is no longer looking at organs. It looks at the processes inside the cell.

The ribosome is a machine that gets instructions from the genetic code and operates chemically in order to produce the product.