Quotes About Biology

We know a lot nowadays about how to extrapolate from rats to people, but we don't only have to rely on that. In a sense we've made ourselves into experimental animals. There are too many of us, too crowded, in an environment we've poisoned with our own-uh-byproducts. Now when this happens to a wild species, or to rats in a lab, the next generation turns out weaker and slower and more timid. This is a defense mechanism.

The Creator, if He exists, has a special preference for beetles.

were a purely biological matter." He relates also how a nurse at the George Washington Hospital attempted to excite him by detailing the characteristics she desired her lovers to have. He draws a disapproving picture of the American woman's seductive appearance ("thirsty lips…bulging breasts…smooth legs…") and flirtatious demeanour ("the calling eye…the provocative laugh…").

Interestingly enough, it is now known that play behaviour is not limited to birds and mammals. Monitor lizards, turtles, crocodiles and even fish and cephalopods have been reported to engage in behaviours that do not seem to serve any other purpose than simply having fun.27,28 If all these animals could play, we are certain that Mesozoic dinosaurs could, too.

Life needs a membrane to contain itself so it can replicate and mutate.

One amino acid does not a protein make-let alone a being.

In the last few decades, mankind has sinned terribly against the law of natural selection. We haven't just maintained life unworthy of life, we have even allowed it to multiply.

It is notoriously difficult to define the word living.

Life is the mode of action of proteins.

The critical first billion years, during which life began, are blank pages in the earth's history.

All life is nucleic acid; the rest is commentary.

Dinosaurs replace their teeth throughout their life. And T. rex replaced all of their teeth every year.

In health we're doing the digestive system. We each got assigned a topic for an oral report. I got the small intestine. I swear to god I hate my life.

Without the oceans there would be no life on Earth.

It is not a simple life to be a single cell, although I have no right to say so, having been a single cell so long ago myself that I have no memory at all of that stage of my life.

And there hasn't been much progress in Darwinism since [the life of Darwin].

I'm here as a product of process of evolution, which doesn't make very many exceptions. And which rates life relatively cheaply.

at the end of the day, human beings are products of nature, and if humans have purposes, then at some level purposefulness must arise from nature and therefore be inherent in nature … Might purpose be a genuine property of nature right down to the cellular or even the subcellular level? (p. 121–2)

The creation myth is a Darwinian device for survival.

Despite all of our pretenses and fantasies, we always have been and will remain a biological species tied to this particular biological world. Millions of years of evolution are indelibly encoded in our genes. History without the wildlands is no history at all.

Human beings appear to be sufficiently selfish and calculating to be capable of indefinitely greater harmony and social homeostasis. This statement is not self-contradictory. True selfishness, if obedient to the other constraints of mammalian biology, is the key to a more nearly perfect social contract.

THE GREATEST CHALLENGE today, not just in cell biology and ecology but in all of science, is the accurate and complete description of complex systems.

We are all genetic chimeras, at once saints and sinners, champions of the truth and hypocrites – not because humanity has failed to reach some foreordained religious or ideological ideal, but because of the way our species originated across millions of years of biological evolution.

if our genes are inherited and our environment is a train of physical events set in motion before we were born, how can there be a truly independent agent within the brain? The agent itself is created by the interaction of the genes and the environment.