Quotes About Organism

The genes in one organism's cells, then, can have extended phenotypic influence on the living body of another organism; in this case a parasite's genes find phenotypic expression in the behaviour of its host.

Darwin himself said as much: 'If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.' Darwin could find no such case, and nor has anybody since Darwin's time, despite strenuous, indeed desperate, efforts. Many candidates for this holy grail of creationism have been proposed. None has stood up to analysis.

It will be remembered that the 'central theorem' of the selfish organism claims that an animal's behaviour tends to maximize its own (inclusive) fitness. We saw that to talk of an individual behaving so as to maximize its inclusive fitness is equivalent to talking of the gene or genes 'for' that behaviour pattern maximizing their survival.

We have now also seen that, in precisely the same sense as it is ever possible to talk of a gene 'for' a behaviour pattern, it is possible to talk of a gene, in one organism, 'for' a behaviour pattern (or other phenotypic characteristic) in another organism.

To recapitulate, the significance of the difference between growth and reproduction is that reproduction permits a new beginning, a new developmental cycle, and a new organism which may be an improvement, in terms of the fundamental organization of complex structure, over its predecessor.

The integrated multicellular organism is a phenomenon which has emerged as a result of natural selection on primitively independent selfish replicators. It has paid replicators to behave gregariously. The phenotypic power by which they ensure their survival is in principle extended and unbounded. In practice the organism has arisen as a partially bounded local concentration, a shared knot of replicator power.

An extended phenotypic character is the product of the interaction of many genes whose influence impinges from both inside and outside the organism. The interaction is not necessarily harmonious—but then nor are gene interactions within bodies necessarily harmonious

To regard an organism as a replicator, even an asexual organism like a female stick insect, is tantamount to a violation of the 'central dogma' of the non-inheritance of acquired characteristics.

If the organism is not a replicator, what is it? The answer is that it is a communal vehicle for replicators. A vehicle is an entity in which replicators (genes and memes) travel about, an entity whose attributes are affected by the replicators inside it, an entity which may be seen as a compound tool of replicator propagation.

The substance of every true and stable political organism is something resembling an Order, a Männerbünd in charge of the principle of the imperium, comprising men who see loyalty as the basis of their honor.

They do not signify that tomorrow a miracle will happen. They show that, within the ruling-classes themselves, a foreboding is dawning, that the present society is no solid crystal, but an organism capable of change, and is constantly changing.

Every living body continuously eliminates feces, it rejects what is not serviceable to the assimilating organism: what man despises, what arouses his disgust, what he calls evil, are excrements.

Man is an organism, not a mechanism; and the mechanical pacing of his life does harm to his human responses, which naturally follow a kind of free rhythm.

All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.

I have always thought of government as a kind of organism with an insatiable appetite for money, whose natural state is to grow forever unless you do something to starve it.

It has taken four billion years of evolution to generate this kind of organism with this kind of brain, and yet we wake up in the morning and feel bored.

The whole concert of animate nature arose entirely from annoying noises.

Humans have certain properties and characteristics which are intrinsic to them, just as every other organism does. That's human nature.

Every living organism is fulfilled when it follows the right path for its own nature.

The Church is both organism and organization - Woven together in a beautifully messy dance that stumbles across the stage of a fallen world.

The state is not an organism capable of bringing either moral or material improvements to the populace...but merely a vehicle of power for the men and party in power.

The heart is the perfection of the whole organism. Therefore the principles of the power of perception and the souls ability to nourish itself must lie in the heart.

The globe of this earth … [is] … not just a machine but also a organised body as it has a regenerative power.

The notion of a separate organism is clearly an abstraction, as is also its boundary. Underlying all this is unbroken wholeness even though our civilization has developed in such a way as to strongly emphasize the separation into parts.