Quotes by Biologists - Page 11

Genetics might be adequate for explaining microevolution, but microevolutionary changes in gene frequency were not seen as able to turn a reptile into a mammal or to convert a fish into an amphibian. Microevolution looks at adaptations that concern the survival of the fittest, not the arrival of the fittest... The origin of species — Darwin’s problem — remains unsolved.
Scott F. Gilbert
Even if not a single fossil has ever been found, the evidence from surviving animals would still overwhelmingly force the conclusion that Darwin was right.
Richard Dawkins
Wesley went everywhere with me from then on. I even wrapped him in baby blankets and held him in my arms while grocery shopping, to keep him warm during the first cold winter. Occasionally someone would ask to see "the baby," and when I opened the blanket, would leap back shrieking, "What is that?! A dinosaur?" Apparently, the world is full of educated adults with mortgages and stock portfolios who think people are walking around grocery stores with dinosaurs in their arms.
Stacey O'Brien
Every time a scientist publishes a good piece of work, she helps to maintain and raise the standards for what is true. We have to keep chipping away.
Deborah M. Gordon
To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I confess, absurd in the highest degree...The difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection , though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered subversive of the theory.
Charles Darwin
Human suffering has been caused because too many of us cannot grasp that words are only tools for our use.The mere presence in the dictionary of a word like 'living' does not mean it necessarily has to refer to something definite in the real world.
Richard Dawkins
The four stages of acceptance:1. This is worthless nonsense.2. This is an interesting, but perverse, point of view.3. This is true, but quite unimportant.4. I always sai
J.B.S. Haldane
Individuals are not stable things, they are fleeting. Chromosomes too are shuffled into oblivion, like hands of cards soon after they are dealt. But the cards themselves survive the shuffling. The cards are the genes. The genes are not destroyed by crossing-over, they merely change partners and march on. Of course they march on. That is their business. They are the replicators and we are their survival machines. When we have served our purpose we are cast aside. But genes are denizens of geological time: genes are forever.
Richard Dawkins
If the history-deniers who doubt the fact of evolution are ignorant of biology, those who think the world began less than ten thousand years ago are worse than ignorant, they are deluded to the point of perversity. They are denying not only the facts of biology but those of physics, geology, cosmology, archaeology, history and chemistry as well.
Richard Dawkins
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?
Jacques Monod
But anyone who is practically acquainted with scientific work is aware that those who refuse to go beyond fact, rarely get as far as fact; and anyone who has studied the history of science knows that almost every great step therein has been made by the 'anticipation of Nature,' that is, by the invention of hypotheses, which, though verifiable, often had very little foundation to start with.
Thomas Henry Huxley
Science has made us gods even before we are worthy of being men.
Jean Rostand
Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more difficult--at least I have found it so--than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind.
Charles Darwin
A god who is capable of sending intelligible signals to millions of people simultaneously, and of receiving messages from all of them simultaneously, cannot be, whatever else he might be, simple. Such Bandwidth!
Richard Dawkins
I will argue that every scrap of biological diversity is priceless, to be learned and cherished, and never to be surrendered without a struggle.
Edward O. Wilson
Every time you understand something, religion becomes less likely. Only with the discovery of the double helix and the ensuing genetic revolution have we had grounds for thinking that the powers held traditionally to be the exclusive property of the gods might one day be ours. . . .
James D. Watson
The alternative to thinking in evolutionary terms is not to think at all.
Peter Medawar
The science, the art, the jurisprudence, the chief political and social theories, of the modern world have grown out of Greece and Rome—not by favour of, but in the teeth of, the fundamental teachings of early Christianity, to which science, art, and any serious occupation with the things of this world were alike despicable.
Thomas Henry Huxley
The truth is more magical - in the best and most exciting sense of the word - than any myth or made-up mystery or miracle. Science has its own magic: the magic of reality.
Richard Dawkins
We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.
Richard Dawkins
We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universe, to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act.
Charles Darwin
DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.
Richard Dawkins
The following proposition seems to me in a high degree probable—namely, that any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man. For, firstly, the social instincts lead an animal to take pleasure in the society of its fellows, to feel a certain amount of sympathy with them, and to perform various services for them.
Charles Darwin
The Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.
J.B.S. Haldane
One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.
Charles Darwin
It has become almost a cliché to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics.
Richard Dawkins
The man of science has learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by verification.
Thomas Henry Huxley
The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that make life worth living and it does so, if anything, more effectively if it convinces us that the time we have for living is quite finite.
Richard Dawkins
It's been suggested that if the super-naturalists really had the powers they claim, they'd win the lottery every week. I prefer to point out that they could also win a Nobel Prize for discovering fundamental physical forces hitherto unknown to science. Either way, why are they wasting their talents doing party turns on television?By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
Richard Dawkins
The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.
Richard Dawkins
Science is interesting, and if you don't agree you can fuc
Richard Dawkins
Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules; and history records that whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed if not annihilated; scotched, if not slain.
Thomas Henry Huxley
Next to the day when I was almost shot by that arrow, the worst day of my life was when I was almost eaten.
Jennifer Frick-Ruppert
I could tell you of occasionally, every eon, meeting a person, with whom I might stay for a billion years. But what of it? After a billion years there is nothing left to say, and you wander apart, uncaring in the end.
Steven L. Peck
It seemed funny that one day I would go to bed in her arms and the next not feel anything, like a switch had gone off. But no, that wasn’t honest either. This had been building for a long time. Our silences were getting longer. Our arguments more frequent. How do you stay with someone when there are no dreams to build? No purpose to accomplish? No meaning? No meaning —that was the monster that drove us away from one another in the end. Always.
Steven L. Peck
I had a dream about you last night. Eons ago, we created a Universe, then sat back and watched miniature versions of ourselves try to make all the same mistakes we did.
Michael Summers
I had a dream about you last night.We moved into a cabin in the countryside.I couldn't handle the spiders.You couldn't handle my drama.I moved back to the city.
Michael Summers
I had a dream about you last night. It wasn't until after you sold me the talking car, I realized you were the world’s best ventriloquist.
Michael Summers
I had a dream about you last night. We went to the store cupboard to make out, but we ended up sharing our pain and then crying together. We wasn't prepared for this level of intimacy.
Michael Summers
I had a dream about you last night. We were plug sockets in the bedroom. We saw only a short part of their day, but we knew everything of it.
Michael Summers
I had a dream about you last night. We stopped telling each other about our dreams when we realized we were still inside them.
Michael Summers
I didn't dream about you last night. I woke up in fear.
Michael Summers
I had a dream about you last night. We watched pornography together, but purely for the storyline.
Michael Summers
The spread of secondary and latterly of 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
Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not. It is the first lesson that ought to be learned and however early a man's training begins, it is probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.
Thomas Henry Huxley
Even those who do not, or cannot, avail themselves of a scientific education, choose to benefit from the technology that is made possible by the scientific education of others.
Richard Dawkins
Even if it were true that evolution, or the teaching of evolution, encouraged immorality that would not imply that the theory of evolution was false.
Richard Dawkins
Cultivate an optimistic mind, use your imagination, always consider alternatives, and dare to believe that you can make possible what others think is impossible.
Rodolfo Costa
Erase self-doubt by working to build your strengths instead of focusing on your weaknesses.
Rodolfo Costa
It may take little time to get where you want to be, but if you pause and think for a moment, you will notice that you are no longer where you were. Do not stop—keep going.
Rodolfo Costa
For some people, their fear to lose is greater than their desire to succeed, so they end up doing nothing and their dreams become impossible.
Rodolfo Costa
When you experience a negative circumstance or event, do not dwell on it. Be proactive — put your attention on what you need to do to bring the situation to a positive result.
Rodolfo Costa
Learn to adapt. Things change, circumstances change. Adjust yourself and your efforts to what it is presented to you so you can respond accordingly. Never see change as a threat, because it can be an opportunity to learn, to grow, evolve and become a better person.
Rodolfo Costa
Do not sit still; start moving now. In the beginning, you may not go in the direction you want, but as long as you are moving, you are creating alternatives and possibilities.
Rodolfo Costa
The known is finite, the unknown is infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to claim a little more land.
T. H. Huxley
Form is what transforms the content of a work into its essence. Do you understand? The character of music arises out of its form like steam from water,’ Yury Andreevich said. ‘With solid understanding of the general laws of form, which encompass all that is amenable to formulation, one can, by groping further, perceive the individual, the particular. Then, subtracting the general, one can sense a residue where wonder lurks in its purest, most undiluted form. Herein lies the goal of theory: the more fully one grasps what is available for comprehension, the more intensely the ineffable shines.
Lyudmila Ulitskaya
What matters is not the facts but how you discover and think about them.
Richard Dawkins
From the dawn of exact knowledge to the present day, observation, experiment, and speculation have gone hand in hand; and, whenever science has halted or strayed from the right path, it has been, either because its votaries have been content with mere unverified or unverifiable speculation (and this is the commonest case, because observation and experiment are hard work, while speculation is amusing); or it has been, because the accumulation of details of observation has for a time excluded speculation.
Thomas Henry Huxley
I am too much of a skeptic to deny the possibility of anything.
Thomas Henry Huxley
Science replaces private prejudice with public, verifiable evidence.
Richard Dawkins