Best 455 quotes in «biology quotes» category

"Tiger is a natural kind" and "Tiger is a historical particular" are incompatible with each other, and evolutionary biology provides a reason for favoring the latter over the former.

Ubiquity must never be mistaken for biology.

Until we recognize the essential role of biology, our attempts to truly unify the universe will remain a train to nowhere.

We didn't stay in the caves. We haven't stayed on the planet. With biotechnology, gene sequencing, we are not going to even stay within the limitations of biology.

We argue with our biology, and the result of that argument is civilization.

We can truly see that consciousness is operating creatively even in biology, even in the evolution of species.

We're going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones.

We know from biology that new forms of organisms simulate their primitive form as closely as possible at first, even though obliged to exist under changed internal and external conditions.

We must [it has been arued] go beyond reductionism to a holistic recognition that biology and culture interpenetrate in an inextricable manner.

We reject creationism because there is no evidence to support it. By contrast, the notion that biology is at least partially the basis of gender is an empirically supportable, and even well-supported, proposition. The gender scholars reject it on ideological, not evidentiary, grounds.

You can't teach biology with a bottle containing dead animals and organisms.

What an odd time to be a fundamentalist about adaptation and natural selection - when each major subdiscipline of evolutionary biology has been discovering other mechanisms as adjuncts to selection's centrality.

What was that?" Galladon demanded. "I think I just destroyed the biology section" Raoden replied with wonder.

When you choose to view your stress response as helpful, you create the biology of courage.

When you free women so they can choose to have or not to have, or to conceive - that's something that, for millennia, women couldn't do. Biology was, in many ways, destiny. We wouldn't be talking about gender if women could not control their pregnancies.

When you tell filthy jokes as if they were all really serious, and happening all in the life of one family, it becomes a farcical situation. Imagine if you had a script that was imposed on your life - we all do in a certain way, from society, or family, the need to make money, biology, death. But you will have a certain latitude, or freedom, to read the script in your own way.

Yes, there's genetics. Yes, there are chromosomes. Yes, there's biology. Yes, there are environment, sociology, parenting, economics, class, and all of that. But there is something else, as well.

When you have really solid biology and medical science at the core of an issue, it makes it much easier to identify what potential solutions may be.

You are part of a complex social network that changes your biology with every interaction, and which your actions can change.

All answers lie in the neurons.

About 13.5 billion years ago, matter, energy, time and space came into being in what is known as the Big Bang. The story of these fundamental features of our universe is called physics. About 300,000 years after their appearance, matter and energy started to coalesce into complex structures, called atoms, which then combined into molecules. The story of atoms, molecules and their interactions is called chemistry. About 3.8. billion years ago, on a planet called Earth, certain molecules combined to form particularly large and intricate structures called organisms. The story of organisms is called biology. About 70,000 years ago, organisms belonging to the species Homo sapiens started to form even more elaborate structures called cultures. The subsequent development of these human cultures is called history.

A corrupt corporate government employs blatantly corrupt scientists.

After Lincoln became president he campaigned for colonization, and even in the midst of war with the Confederacy found time to work on the project, appointing Rev. James Mitchell as Commissioner of Emigration, in charge of finding a place to which blacks could be sent. On August 14th, 1862, he invited a group of black leaders to the White House to try to persuade them to leave the country, telling them that “there is an unwillingness on the part of our people, harsh as it may be, for you free colored people to remain with us.” He urged them to lead their people to a colonization site in Central America. Lincoln was therefore the first president to invite a delegation of blacks to the White House—and did so to ask them to leave the country. Later that year, in a message to Congress, he argued not just for voluntary colonization but for the forcible removal of free blacks. Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, shared these anti-black sentiments: “This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men.” Like Jefferson, he thought whites had a clear destiny: “This whole vast continent is destined to fall under the control of the Anglo-Saxon race—the governing and self-governing race.” Before he became president, James Garfield wrote, “[I have] a strong feeling of repugnance when I think of the negro being made our political equal and I would be glad if they could be colonized, sent to heaven, or got rid of in any decent way . . . .” Theodore Roosevelt blamed Southerners for bringing blacks to America. In 1901 he wrote: “I have not been able to think out any solution to the terrible problem offered by the presence of the Negro on this continent . . . .” As for Indians, he once said, “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t inquire too closely into the health of the tenth.” William Howard Taft once told a group of black college students, “Your race is adapted to be a race of farmers, first, last, and for all times.” Woodrow Wilson was a confirmed segregationist, and as president of Princeton he refused to admit blacks. He enforced segregation in government offices and was supported in this by Charles Eliot, president of Harvard, who argued that “civilized white men” could not be expected to work with “barbarous black men.” During the presidential campaign of 1912, Wilson took a strong position in favor of excluding Asians: “I stand for the national policy of exclusion. . . . We cannot make a homogeneous population of a people who do not blend with the Caucasian race. . . . Oriental coolieism will give us another race problem to solve and surely we have had our lesson.” Warren Harding also wanted the races kept separate: “Men of both races [black and white] may well stand uncompromisingly against every suggestion of social equality. This is not a question of social equality, but a question of recognizing a fundamental, eternal, inescapable difference. Racial amalgamation there cannot be.

All disciplines of science are built on the causality of the relationships governing related events. Yet the theory of evolution is built upon the idea of accidental changes that resulted in complex living systems. I was unable to comprehend how the notion that an infinite number of random accidents systematically happened to produce living species, and kept improving these beings, is justified.

...all flourishing is mutual.

All our sentiments - religious, romantic or any other - are born in the neurons.

All organisms vary. It is in the highest degree improbable that any given variety should have exactly the same relations to surrounding conditions as the parent stock. In that case it is either better fitted (when the variation may be called useful), or worse fitted, to cope with them. If better, it will tend to supplant the parent stock; if worse, it will tend to be extinguished by the parent stock. If (as is hardly conceivable) the new variety is so perfectly adapted to the conditions that no improvement upon it is possible,—it will persist, because, though it does not cease to vary, the varieties will be inferior to itself. If, as is more probable, the new variety is by no means perfectly adapted to its conditions, but only fairly well adapted to them, it will persist, so long as none of the varieties which it throws off are better adapted than itself. On the other hand, as soon as it varies in a useful way, i.e. when the variation is such as to adapt it more perfectly to its conditions, the fresh variety will tend to supplant the former.

All sorts of changes in cellular machinery have shown up that have nothing to do with the sequence of DNA but still have profound, and heritable, impacts for generations to come. For example, malnourished rats give birth to undersized pups that, even if well fed, grow up to give birth to undersized pups. Which means, among other things, that poor old Lamarck was right—at least some acquired traits can be passed down.

All the more recent work on alkaptonuria has... strengthened the belief that the homogentisic acid excreted is derived from tyrosine, but why alkaptonuric individuals pass the benzene ring of their tyrosine unbroken and how and where the peculiar chemical change from tyrosine to homogentisic acid is brought about, remain unsolved problems.

Addiction is when natural biological imperatives, like the need for food, sex, relaxation or status, become prioritised to the point of destructiveness. It is exacerbated by a culture that understandably exploits this mechanic as it's a damn good way to sell Mars bars and Toyotas.

Lister saw the vast importance of the discoveries of Pasteur. He saw it because he was watching on the heights, and he was watching there alone.

A lifetime can be spent in a Magellanic voyage around the trunk of a single tree.

All species on earth are related to one another like cousins and distant kin in a vast family tree of life.

All the so-called philosophical notion of “love without attachment” or “detached love” are biologically non-existent on this planet. We humans are biologically designed through millions of years of evolution to grow attachment. Love cannot survive without attachment.

Angelo," he said, and felt the bed rock as Angelo shuddered, caught halfway between REM atonia - the inhibition of movement caused by the shutdown of monoamines in the brain - and waking.

A multitude of harlequin lifeforms bobbed and twirled and played in the depths of the Atlantic. Pink cucumbers with thorny backs. Algae. Starfish. Annelids with simple brains and a hundred toes. Sponges—like yellow, swollen hands—sucked in water and pushed out oxygen. Most amusing were the mysterious buggers who had no likeness on the previous earth; tiny beasts with exotic exoskeletons engraved with deep grid-like patterns, snails with horns, and slithering plants that looked like magenta weeping willows.

An evolutionary perspective of our place in the history of the earth reminds us that Homo sapiens sapiens has occupied the planet for the tiniest fraction of that planet's four and a half thousand million years of existence. In many ways we are a biological accident, the product of countless propitious circumstances. As we peer back through the fossil record, through layer upon layer of long-extinct species, many of which thrived far longer than the human species is ever likely to do, we are reminded of our mortality as a species. There is no law that declares the human animal to be different, as seen in this broad biological perspective, from any other animal. There is no law that declares the human species to be immortal.

Among all the occurrences possible in the universe the a priori probability of any particular one of them verges upon zero. Yet the universe exists; particular events must take place in it, the probability of which (before the event) was infinitesimal. At the present time we have no legitimate grounds for either asserting or denying that life got off to but a single start on earth, and that, as a consequence, before it appeared its chances of occurring were next to nil. ... Destiny is written concurrently with the event, not prior to it... The universe was not pregnant with life nor the biosphere with man. Our number came up in the Monte Carlo game. Is it surprising that, like the person who has just made a million at the casino, we should feel strange and a little unreal?

Among the Founders, Thomas Jefferson wrote about race at greatest length. He thought blacks were mentally inferior to whites and biologically distinct: “[They] secrete less by the kidnies [sic], and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a strong and disagreeable odor.” He hoped slavery would be abolished, but he did not want free blacks to remain in America: “When freed, [the Negro] is to be removed from beyond the reach of mixture.” Jefferson was one of the first and most influential advocates of “colonization,” or returning blacks to Africa. He also believed in the destiny of whites as a racially distinct people. In 1786 he wrote, “Our Confederacy [the United States] must be viewed as the nest from which all America, North and South, is to be peopled.” In 1801 he looked forward to the day “when our rapid multiplication will expand itself . . . over the whole northern, if not the southern continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, and by similar laws; nor can we contemplate with satisfaction either blot or mixture on that surface.

And then red, marbled with pink, around two imperfect circles of bone-white with dark centers. A space where there shouldn’t be one—ground visible, covered with grass, and some clover. Red again—an image of the tomatoes on the kitchen counter flashed across Beatrice’s mind—surrounding two more bone-white circles. The hand bearing the peacock was severed, that was why Beatrice could see a sliver of ground where basic biology dictated there should be skin. There was a clean cut five inches or so above the wrist, just missing the edge of the peacock’s tail, the muscles and tendons—the bones—neatly sliced through like a Swiss round steak prepared by an expert butcher.

An example of such emergent phenomena is the origin of life from non-living chemical compounds in the oldest, lifeless oceans of the earth. Here, aided by the radiation energy received from the sun, countless chemical materials were synthesized and accumulated in such a way that they constituted, as it were, a primeval “soup.” In this primeval soup, by infinite variations of lifeless growth and decay of substances during some billions of years, the way of life was ultimately reached, with its metabolism characterized by selective assimilation and dissimilation as end stations of a sluiced and canalized flow of free chemical energy.

An itinerant selfish gene/ Said 'bodies a- plenty I've seen./ You think you're so clever/ But I'll live for ever./ You're just a survival machine.

Ants have a powerful caste system. A colony typically contains ants that carry out radically different roles and have markedly different body structures and behaviors. These roles, Reinberg learned, are often determined not by genes but by signals from the physical and social environment. 'Sibling ants, in their larval stage, become segregated into the different types based on environmental signals,' he said. 'Their genomes are nearly identical, but the way the genes are used—turned on or off, and kept on or off—must determine what an ant "becomes." It seemed like a perfect system to study epigenetics. And so Shelley and I caught a flight to Arizona to see Jürgen Liebig, the ant biologist, in his lab.' The collaboration between Reinberg, Berger, and Liebig has been explosively successful—the sort of scientific story ('two epigeneticists walk into a bar and meet an entomologist') that works its way into a legend. Carpenter ants, one of the species studied by the team, have elaborate social structures, with queens (bullet-size, fertile, winged), majors (bean-size soldiers who guard the colony but rarely leave it), and minors (nimble, grain-size, perpetually moving foragers). In a recent, revelatory study, researchers in Berger’s lab injected a single dose of a histone-altering chemical into the brains of major ants. Remarkably, their identities changed; caste was recast. The major ants wandered away from the colony and began to forage for food. The guards turned into scouts. Yet the caste switch could occur only if the chemical was injected during a vulnerable period in the ants’ development. [...] The impact of the histone-altering experiment sank in as I left Reinberg’s lab and dodged into the subway. [...] All of an ant’s possible selves are inscribed in its genome. Epigenetic signals conceal some of these selves and reveal others, coiling some, uncoiling others. The ant chooses a life between its genes and its epigenes—inhabiting one self among its incipient selves.

As the physicist Paul Davies puts it, 'If everything needs everything else, how did the communities of molecules ever arise in the first place?' It is rather as if all the ingredients in your kitchen somehow got together and baked themselves into a cake - but a cake that could moreover divide when necessary to produce more cakes. It is little wonder that we call it the miracle of life. It is also little wonder that we have barely begun to understand it.

A recognized fact which goes back to the earliest times is that every living organism is not the sum of a multitude of unitary processes, but is, by virtue of interrelationships and of higher and lower levels of control, an unbroken unity. When research, in the efforts of bringing understanding, as a rule examines isolated processes and studies them, these must of necessity be removed from their context. In general, viewed biologically, this experimental separation involves a sacrifice. In fact, quantitative findings of any material and energy changes preserve their full context only through their being seen and understood as parts of a natural order.

As long as museums and universities send out expeditions to bring to light new forms of living and extinct animals and new data illustrating the interrelations of organisms and their environments, as long as anatomists desire a broad comparative basis human for anatomy, as long as even a few students feel a strong curiosity to learn about the course of evolution and relationships of animals, the old problems of taxonomy, phylogeny and evolution will gradually reassert themselves even in competition with brilliant and highly fruitful laboratory studies in cytology, genetics and physiological chemistry.

As relates to life on Earth, the fine structure constant determines how solar radiation is absorbed in our atmosphere, and it also applies to how photosynthesis works in plants.

At the atomic level, matter does not even exist with certainty; it only exists as a tendency to exist.

A tissue is evidently an enduring thing. It's functional and structural conditions become modified from moment to moment. Time is really the fourth dimension of living organisms. It enters as part into the constitution of a tissue. Cell colonies, or organs, are events which progressively unfold themselves. They must be studied like history.

Being loved is not a biological need.