Quotes About Organism

It makes more sense to see the body as serving the needs of the genes than vice versa. Bottom–up.

For every living species, growth is a necessity of survival. Life is motion, a process of self-sustaining action that an organism must carry on in order to remain in existence. This principle is equally evident in the simple energy-conversions of a plant and in the long-range, complex activities of man. Biologically, inactivity is death.

Todo organismo viviente se enfrenta a una alternativa constante: la de la vida o la muerte. La vida es un proceso de acción, autosustentadora y autogenerada. Si un organismo falla en la misma, muere; sus elementos químicos perduran, pero su vida termina. Es sólo el concepto de vida el que hace posible el concepto de valor. Sólo para un ser viviente las cosas pueden resultar buenas o malas.

Romance is a universally unspoken language understood by all living organism on this planet except heterosexual men.

Any language is a supreme achievement of a uniquely human collective genius, as divine and endless a mystery as a living organism." A

The brain may be a physical system made of ordinary matter, but that matter is organized in such a way as to give rise to a sentient organism with a capacity to feel pleasure and pain. And that in turn sets the stage for the emergence of morality.

The sequence of bases in a DNA molecule correlates with the sequence of amino acids in the proteins that make up the organism's body, and they got that sequence by structuring the organism's ancestors—reducing their entropy—into the improbable configurations that allowed them to capture energy and grow and reproduce.

We are organisms, not angels, and our minds are organs, not pipelines to the truth. Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life and death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness and answer any question we are capable of asking. We cannot hold ten thousand words in short-term memory. We cannot see in ultraviolet light. And perhaps we cannot solve conundrums like free will and sentience.

The "fit" in "fitness" is therefore the matching of organismal attribute to environmental demand.

But one group did. By 3.5 billion years ago, bacteria had emerged, and continue to this day as the most populous kind of organism on Earth.

Their function is to keep the organism alive. Emotion is the feeling an organism has when it consciously experiences these consequences. Keeping separate the processes that detect and respond to significant events from the processes that generate feelings is thus key to making progress in understanding what emotions actually are and how they work. Although these processes are related, conflating them only impedes a genuine understanding of the emotional brain.

This uneven rate of evolution of different properties of an organism is called mosaic evolution , and it may create difficulties for classification.

How does the living organism avoid decay? The obvious answer is: By eating, drinking, breathing and (in the case of plants) assimilating. The technical term is metabolism. The Greek word () means change or exchange. Exchange of what?

It is by avoiding the rapid decay into the inert state of 'equilibrium' that an organism appears so enigmatic;

if we were organisms so sensitive that a single atom, or even a few atoms, could make a perceptible impression on our senses – Heavens, what would life be like! To stress one point: an organism of that kind would most certainly not be capable of developing the kind of orderly thought which, after passing through a long sequence of earlier stages, ultimately results in forming, among many other ideas, the idea of an atom.

To the physicist – but only to him – I could hope to make my view clearer by saying: The living organism seems to be a macroscopic system which in part of its behaviour approaches to that purely mechanical (as contrasted with thermodynamical) conduct to which all systems tend, as the temperature approaches the absolute zero and the molecular disorder is removed.

You see from this again that an organism must have a comparatively gross structure in order to enjoy the benefit of fairly accurate laws,

Now, I think, few words more are needed to disclose the point of resemblance between a clockwork and an organism. It is simply and solely that the latter also hinges upon a solid – the aperiodic crystal forming the hereditary substance, largely withdrawn from the disorder of heat motion.

Hence the awkward expression 'negative entropy' can be replaced by a better one: entropy, taken with the negative sign, is itself a measure of order. Thus the device by which an organism maintains itself stationary at a fairly high level of orderliness ( = fairly low level of entropy) really consists in continually sucking orderliness from its environment.

And why could all this not be fulfilled in the case of an organism composed of a moderate number of atoms only and sensitive already to the impact of one or a few atoms only? Because we know all atoms to perform all the time a completely disorderly heat motion, which, so to speak, opposes itself to their orderly behaviour and does not allow the events that happen between a small number of atoms to enrol themselves according to any recognizable laws.

Needless to say, taken literally, this is just as absurd. For an adult organism the energy content is as stationary as the material content. Since, surely, any calorie is worth as much as any other calorie, one cannot see how a mere exchange could help.

The living organism seems to be a macroscopic system which in part of its behaviour approaches to that purely mechanical (as contrasted with thermodynamical) conduct to which all systems tend, as

To the physicist – but only to him – I could hope to make my view clearer by saying: The living organism seems to be a macroscopic system which in part of its behaviour approaches to that purely mechanical (as contrasted with thermodynamical) conduct to which all systems tend, as the temperature approaches the absolute zero and

To distinguish between the possession of an organ and the urge to use it and to increase its skill by practice, to regard them as two different characteristics of the organism in question, would be an artificial distinction, made possible by an abstract language but having no counterpart in nature.