Quotes by Biologists

A city is more than a place in space, it is a drama in time
Patrick Geddes
My laboratory is interested in the related challenges of understanding the origin of life on the early earth, and constructing synthetic cellular life in the laboratory. Focusing on artificial life frees us to explore novel chemical systems, but what we learn from these systems helps us to understand possible pathways leading to the origin of life. Our basic design for a synthetic cell involves the encapsulation of a spontaneously replicating nucleic acid, which acts as the genetic material, within a spontaneously replicating membrane vesicle, which provides spatial localization. We are using chemical synthesis to make nucleic acids with modified nucleobases and sugar-phosphate backbones.
Jack W. Szostak
All my life I have placed great store in civility and good manners, practices I find scarce among the often hard-edged, badly socialized scientists with whom I associate. Tone of voice means a great deal to me in the course of debate. I despise the arrogance and doting self-regard so frequently found among the very bright.
Edward O. Wilson
Do experimental work but keep in mind that other investigators in the same field will consider your discoveries as less than one fourth as important as they seem to you.
Charles Manning Child
Science affects the average man and woman in two ways already. He or she benefits by its application driving a motor-car or omnibus instead of a horse-drawn vehicle, and being treated for disease by a doctor or surgeon rather than a witch.
J.B.S. Haldane
Every day, hundreds of observations and experiments pour into the hopper of the scientific literature. Many of them don't have much to do with evolution - they're observations about the details of physiology, biochemistry, development, and so on - but many of them do. And every fact that has something to do with evolution confirms its truth. Every fossil that we find, every DNA molecule that we sequence, every organ system that we dissect, supports the idea that species evolved from common ancestors. Despite innumerable possible observations that could prove evolution untrue, we don't have a single one. We don't find mammals in Precambrian rocks, humans in the same layers as dinosaurs, or any other fossils out of evolutionary order. DNA sequencing supports the evolutionary relationships of species originally deduced from the fossil record. And, as natural selection predicts, we find no species with adaptations that only benefit a different species. We do find dead genes and vestigial organs, incomprehensible under the idea of special creation. Despite a million chances to be wrong, evolution always comes up right. That is as close as we can get to a scientific truth.
Jerry A. Coyne
Even today a good many distinguished minds seem unable to accept or even to understand that from a source of noise natural selection alone and unaided could have drawn all the music of the biosphere. In effect natural selection operates upon the products of chance and can feed nowhere else; but it operates in a domain of very demanding conditions, and from this domain chance is barred. It is not to chance but to these conditions that evolution owes its generally progressive course, its successive conquests, and the impression it gives of a smooth and steady unfolding.
Jacques Monod
like all other living creatures, I am the descendant of survivors, so the fear in my head is the voice of my ancestors whispering their accumulated wisdom.
David George Haskell
The most obvious and the most distinctive features of the History of Civilisation, during the last fifty years, is the wonderful increase of industrial production by the application of machinery, the improvement of old technical processes and the invention of new ones, accompanied by an even more remarkable development of old and new means of locomotion and intercommunication. By this rapid and vast multiplication of the commodities and conveniences of existence, the general standard of comfort has been raised, the ravages of pestilence and famine have been checked, and the natural obstacles, which time and space offer to mutual intercourse, have been reduced in a manner, and to an extent, unknown to former ages. The diminution or removal of local ignorance and prejudice, the creation of common interests among the most widely separated peoples, and the strengthening of the forces of the organisation of the commonwealth against those of political or social anarchy, thus effected, have exerted an influence on the present and future fortunes of mankind the full significance of which may be divined, but cannot, as yet, be estimated at its full value.
Thomas Henry Huxley
How have people come to be taken in by The Phenomenon of Man? We must not underestimate the size of the market for works of this kind [pseudoscience/'woo'], for philosophy-fiction. Just as compulsory primary education created a market catered for by cheap dailies and weeklies, so the spread of secondary and latterly tertiary education has created a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought.
Peter Medawar
They travel long distances to stroll along the seashore, for reasons they can't put into words.
Edward O. Wilson
If Darwinists are opposed to mentioning scientific problems with their view, you would think they would be even more opposed to mentioning intelligent design. Yet Darwinists have been discussing ID in public school science classes for years... Biology textbooks have been mentioning intelligent design since the late 1990s—but only to misrepresent and disparage it.
Jonathan Wells
Intelligent Design is fraught with even more difficulties, as it suggests God as one who dips His hand in every now and then to bring about the first microbial life, to bring about new forms during the Cambrian explosion, and to finally create humans after 4.55 billion years of earth, while He was doing... what exactly? According to Intelligent Design advocates, God tinkers with animal life every once in a few hundred million years or so, for reasons never made explicitly clear.
Aaron R. Yilmaz
False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for everyone takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness; and when this is done, one path towards error is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened.
Charles Darwin