Quotes by Biologists - Page 2

Act decidedly and take the consequences. No good is ever done by hesitation.
Thomas Henry Huxley
To what extent is any given man morally responsible for any given act? We do not know.
Dr. Alexis Carrel
I have called the principle by which each slight variation if useful is preserved by the term of Natural Selection.
Charles Darwin
It is faith and not reason which impels men to action. ... Intelligence is content to point out the road but never drives us along it.
Dr. Alexis Carrel
The most considerable difference I note among men is not in their readiness to fall into error but in their readiness to acknowledge these inevitable lapses.
Thomas Henry Huxley
The first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else.
Barry Commoner
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 Huxley
I agree with Agassiz that dogs possess something very like a conscience.
Charles Darwin
Hold on hold fast hold out. Patience is genius.
Georges de Buffon
Man cannot remake himself without suffering for he is both the marble and the sculptor.
Dr. Alexis Carrel
Life leaps like a geyser for those who drill through the rock of inertia.
Dr. Alexis Carrel
In science there is and will remain a Platonic element which could not be taken away without ruining it. Among the infinite diversity of singular phenomena science can only look for invariants.
Jacques Monod
The very idea of "managing" a forest in the first place is oxymoronic, because a forest is an ecosystem that is by definition self-managing.
Bernd Heinrich
The habit of questioning authority is one of the most valuable gifts that a book, or a teacher, can give a young would-be scientist.
Richard Dawkins
Using information about animal behavior to justify social or political ideology is wrong . . . People need to be able to make decisions about their lives without having to worry about keeping up with the bonobos.
Marlene Zuk
The essential thing is to run period!And to do it for a long time and consistently and then everything will take care of itself.
Bernd Heinrich
Movement is the essence of life.
Bernd Heinrich
What else is there to do in this world but love other people?
James E. Shapiro
To speculate without facts is to attempt to enter a house of which one has not the key, by wandering aimlessly round and round, searching the walls and now and then peeping through the windows. Facts are the key.
Julian Huxley
Discretion can be abused, and rulebooks are important safeguards against that. But the balance has shifted too far in the direction of an obsessive reverence for rules.
Richard Dawkins
Attention, if sudden and close, graduates into surprise; and this into astonishment; and this into stupefied amazement.
Charles Darwin
Of moral purpose I see no trace in Nature. That is an article of exclusively human manufacture and very much to our credit.
Thomas Henry Huxley
Revolutionary moments often seem to occur in history when large numbers of individuals have a change in consciousness, regarding themselves and their status
Robert Trivers
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
We cannot fathom the marvelous complexity of an organic being; but on the hypothesis here advanced this complexity is much increased. Each living creature must be looked at as a microcosm--a little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars in heaven.
Charles Darwin
The cell, this elementary keystone of living nature, is far from being a peculiar chemical giant molecule or even a living protein and as such is not likely to fall prey to the field of an advanced chemistry. The cell is itself an organism, constituted of many small units of life.
Oscar Hertwig
Branches or types are characterized by the plan of their structure,Classes, by the manner in which that plan is executed, as far as ways and means are concerned, Orders, by the degrees of complication of that structure, Families, by their form, as far as determined by structure, Genera, by the details of the execution in special parts, andSpecies, by the relations of individuals to one another and to the world in which they live, as well as by the proportions of their parts, their ornamentation, etc.
Louis Agassiz
The cause of nutrition and growth resides not in the organism as a whole but in the separate elementary parts—the cells.
Theodor Schwann
The principal result of my investigation is that a uniform developmental principle controls the individual elementary units of all organisms, analogous to the finding that crystals are formed by the same laws in spite of the diversity of their forms.
Theodor Schwann
Life is not found in atoms or molecules or genes as such, but in organization; not in symbiosis but in synthesis.
Edwin Grant Conklin
For it is not cell nuclei, not even individual chromosomes, but certain parts of certain chromosomes from certain cells that must be isolated and collected in enormous quantities for analysis; that would be the precondition for placing the chemist in such a position as would allow him to analyse [the hereditary material] more minutely than [can] the morphologists ... For the morphology of the nucleus has reference at the very least to the gearing of the clock, but at best the chemistry of the nucleus refers only to the metal from which the gears are formed.
Theodor Boveri
The foreign policy aim of ants can be summed up as follows: restless aggression, territorial conquest, and genocidal annihilation of neighboring colonies whenever possible. If ants had nuclear weapons, they would probably end the world in a week.
Bert Hölldobler
I knew I was going to be a cellular biologist whose research would focus on scrutinizing every nuance of the cell's ultrastructure to gain insights into the secrets of cellular life.
Bruce H. Lipton
The outgroup is rocks.
Joseph Felsenstein
A lifetime can be spent in a Magellanic voyage around the trunk of a single tree.
Edward O. Wilson
We're going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones.
Richard Dawkins
Hierarchical organization in biological systems thus is characterized by an exquisite array of delicately and intricately interlocked order, steadily increasing in level and complexity and thereby giving rise neogenetically to emergent properties.
Clifford Grobstein
We tend to take summer's vitality for granted, when in actuality it is just one prolonged drought, or disease, away from decimation.
Sue Leaf
…numerical precision is the very soul of science, and its attainment affords the best, perhaps the only criterion of the truth of theories and the correctness of experiments.
D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson
The important thing to remember about mathematics is not to be frightened
Richard Dawkins
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
When the hypocrisy of life appears we often fail to recognise it or the question it raises
Jeremy Griffith
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
During this time (at high school) I discovered the Public Library... It was here that I found a source of knowledge and the means to acquire it by reading, a habit of learning which I still follow to this day. I also became interested in chemistry and gradually accumulated enough test tubes and other glassware to do chemical experiments, using small quantities of chemicals purchased from a pharmacy supply house. I soon graduated to biochemistry and tried to discover what gave flowers their distinctive colours. I made the (to me) astounding discovery that the pigments I extracted changed their colours when I changed the pH of the solution.
Sydney Brenner
In order to get over the ethical difficulties presented by the naive naturalism of many parts of those Scriptures, in the divine authority of which he firmly believed, Philo borrowed from the Stoics (who had been in like straits in respect of Greek mythology), that great Excalibur which they had forged with infinite pains and skill—the method of allegorical interpretation. This mighty 'two-handed engine at the door' of the theologian is warranted to make a speedy end of any and every moral or intellectual difficulty, by showing that, taken allegorically or, as it is otherwise said, 'poetically' or, 'in a spiritual sense,' the plainest words mean whatever a pious interpreter desires they should mean.
Thomas Henry Huxley
-Back there our sun doesn't speak.-Where's "there," Miss Marta?-Back there, in Europe. Here, it's different. Here, the sun moans, whispers, shouts.-Surely-I commented delicately-the sun is always the same.- You're wrong. There, the sun is a stone. Here it's a fruit.
Mia Couto
What is the mass of a feeling? What is its wavelength, its position on the electromagnetic spectrum?
Paul McAuley
At the atomic level, matter does not even exist with certainty; it only exists as a tendency to exist.
Bruce H. Lipton
Consider that people will talk about the fact that I now "pass" as a woman, but nobody ever asks about how difficult it must have been for me to "pass" as a man before.
Julia Serano
The most radical thing that any of us can do is to stop projecting our beliefs about gender onto other people's behaviors and bodies
Julia Serano
It may be underfunded and at times mismanaged, but the [Endangered Species] Act is an unprecedented attempt to delegate human-caused extinction to the chapters of history we would rather not revisit: the Slave Trade, the Indian Removal Policy, the subjection of women, child labor, segregation. The Endangered Species Act is a zero-tolerance law: no new extinctions. It keeps eyes on the ground with legal backing-the gun may be in the holster most of the time, but its available if necessary to keep species from disappearing. I discovered in my travels that a law protecting all animals and plants, all of nature, might be as revolutionary-and as American-as the Declaration of Independence.
Joe Roman
[S]elfish members win within groups, but groups of altruists best groups of selfish members. (63)
Edward O. Wilson
Pseudo idealism: apparent charitable behaviour that on scrutiny is revealed as selfish, because the giver is engaging in it only so that he or she can feel good about him or herself
Jeremy Griffith
By speech first, but far more by writing, man has been able to put something of himself beyond death. In tradition and in books an integral part of the individual persists, for it can influence the minds and actions of other people in different places and at different times: a row of black marks on a page can move a man to tears, though the bones of him that wrote it are long ago crumbled to dust. In truth, the whole progress of civilization is based upon this power.
Julian Huxley
Strategies that did well in competition with other strategies were not, however, those that maximized the returns to agents. Rather, we found a strong inverse relationship between the mean fitness of individuals in populations containing only one strategy, and that strategy's performance in the tournament. This finding illustrates the parasitic effect of strategies that rely heavily on OBSERVE. Strategies using a mixture of social and asocial learning are vulnerable to being outcompeted by those using social learning alone, which may result in a population with lower average returns. These findings are evocative of an established rule in ecology; this specifies that, among competitors for a scarce resource, the dominant competitor will be the species that can persist at the lowest resource level. An equivalent rule may apply when alternative social learning strategies compete: the strategies that eventually dominates will be the one that can persist with the lowest frequency of asocial learning.
Kevin N. Laland
I fear that there will be no neat ending to this, in the manner of the old Greek plays. Where the Gods descend, and all is explained, and tidied away.
Paul McAuley
Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, though in very different ways, but they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle.
Charles Darwin
To love abundantly is to live abundantly, and to love forever is to live forever.
Henry Drummond
It is certain that the labors of these early workers in the field of natural knowledge were brought to a standstill by the decay and disruption of the Roman Empire, the consequent disorganisation of society, and the diversion of men's thoughts from sublunary matters to the problems of the supernatural world suggested by Christian dogma in the Middle Ages. And, notwithstanding sporadic attempts to recall men to the investigation of nature, here and there, it was not until the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that physical science made a new start, founding itself, at first, altogether upon that which had been done by the Greeks. Indeed, it must be admitted that the men of the Renaissance, though standing on the shoulders of the old philosophers, were a long time before they saw as much as their forerunners had done.
Thomas Henry Huxley