Quotes by Biologists - Page 11

Think? Why think! We have computers to do that for us.
Jean Rostand
The race is now on between the technoscientific and scientific forces that are destroying the living environment and those that can be harnessed to save it. . . . If the race is won, humanity can emerge in far better condition than when it entered, and with most of the diversity of life still intact.
Edward O. Wilson
There was something built into the human brain by natural selection which was once useful, and which now manifests itself as religion.
Richard Dawkins
The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.
John Burdon Sanderson Haldane
Eating dinner with conservation biologists was like walking through a minefield of ethical decisions: grasslands have been overgrazed by steer raised for beef, and all cattle emit greenhouse gases though enteric fermentation; the poop from industrially raised chickens poisons the Chesapeake; the Amazon has been slashed and burned for soy--and don't even mention seafood. To this bunch of herpetologists, the sin of ordering shrimp lay in the bycatch--young fish, and especially sea turtles, caught in the nets and discarded, dead or dying.
Joe Roman
I have never been able to understand why pigeon-shooting at Hurlingham should be refined and polite while a rat-killing match in Whitechapel is low.
T. H. Huxley
To accomplish our destiny ... we must cover before nightfall the distance assigned to each of us.
Dr. Alexis Carrel
If you've got a religious belief that withers in the face of observations of the natural world, you ought to rethink your beliefs - rethinking the world isn't an option.
P.Z. Myers
The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.
Richard Dawkins
As our mother earth is a mere speck in the sunbeam in the illimitable universe, so man himself is but a tiny grain of protoplasm in the perishable framework of organic nature. [This] clearly indicates the true place of man in nature, but it dissipates the prevalent illusion of man's supreme importance and the arrogance with which he sets himself apart from the illimitable universe and exalts himself to the position of its most valuable element.
Ernst Haeckel
This is a woman who didn’t want her viewpoints challenged, nor to see the views of the half of the world that comprises men. Her assumption is that all male authors are sexist and that their books distort the views of women....that’s bigoted and despicable: the form of feminism that sees men as the enemy from the outset, and seeks to reinforce that prejudice by reading only books that keep her in her safe space.....The future, in both life and books, is men and women together, with a mutual understanding that can come only from learning about each other’s thoughts. [About Caitlin Moran's sexist statement that girls shouldn't read any books written by men.]
Jerry Coyne
Signal transduction science recognizes that the fate and behavior of an organism is directly linked to its perception of the environment.
Bruce H. Lipton
What's needed on Earth is love of the dark side of ourselves
Jeremy Griffith
[Y]ou are here to learn something. Don’t try to figure out what it is. This can be frustrating and unproductive.
Steven L. Peck
Listen, and you will realize that we are made not from cells or from atoms. We are made from stories.
Mia Couto
The great sage Thales once put the general matter succinctly "Oh master," he was asked, "what is the most difficult thing to do?" "To know thyself", he replied. "And the easiest?" "To give advice to others.
Robert Trivers
The long-lived gene as an evolutionary unit is not any particular physical structure but the textual archival information that is copied on down the generations. [I]t is widely distributed in space among different individuals, and widely distributed in time over many generations. [A] successful gene will be one that does well in the environments provided by these other genes that it is likely to meet in lots of different bodies.
Richard Dawkins
Suddenly I realized that a cell's life is controlled by the physical and energetic environment and not by its genes. Genes are simply molecular blueprints used in the construction of cells, tissues, and organs. The environment serves as a "contractor" who reads and engages those genetic blueprints and is ultimately responsible for the character of a cell's life. It is a single cell's "awareness" of the environment, not its genes, that sets into motion the mechanisms of life.
Bruce H. Lipton
Running is perhaps the most fundamental of all sports, and it is economically the least costly to perform. As a consequence, it is the most democratic and most competitive of all sports because individual merit can prevail despite economic equality. It is a sport for everyone, the whole world over.
Bernd Heinrich
The controversy between Darwinism and intelligent design has the characteristics of major scientific revolutions in the past. Darwinists are losing power because they treat with contempt the very people on whom they depend the most: American taxpayers. The outcome of this scientific revolution will be decided by young people who have the courage to question dogmatism and follow the evidence wherever it leads.
Jonathan Wells
For my own part I would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded enemy in order to save the life of his keeper; or from that old baboon, who, descending from the mountains, carried away in triumph his young comrade from a crowd of astonished dogs—as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practices infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions.
Charles Darwin
The embryological record is almost always abbreviated in accordance with the tendency of nature (to be explained on the principle of survival of the fittest) to attain her needs by the easiest means.
Francis Maitland Balfour
But if the ants are not despondent because they have failed to produce a new social invention or convention in 65 million years, why should we be discouraged because some of our institutions and castes have not been able to evolve a new idea in the past fifty centuries?
William Morton Wheeler
There can be no doubt that the existing Fauna and Flora is but the last term of a long series of equally numerous contemporary species, which have succeeded one another, by the slow and gradual substitution of species for species, in the vast interval of time which has elapsed between the deposition of the earliest fossiliferous strata and the present day.
Thomas Henry Huxley
The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us and I for one must be content to remain agnostic.
Charles Darwin